Driven by Emotions (14 page)

“No,” I said.

“Atta girl,” said Joy.

That is why sometimes I thought Joy didn’t like me very much.

I tried to stay in my Circle of Sadness. I really did. I had never disobeyed Joy before, but…

You know how I said it was like the core memories wanted me to touch them? Well, as Riley went through her first day of school, I got that feeling again, more and more. And it wasn’t just
the core memories—I got the feeling that I was supposed to be steering. That even though Joy said this was a happy day…it wasn’t. It was sad. And if it was sad, I needed to be at
the controls.

Still, I stayed put while Riley got to school, while she walked into the building, while she sat at her desk. I even stayed still when the teacher asked her to introduce herself, and when Joy
called up a memory for Riley to describe to all the other kids.

The memory was of Riley and her family skating together. It was a golden, happy memory, but it pulled me like a magnet because it needed me. It needed to be blue. It needed to be a little sad.
After all, Riley wouldn’t be able to skate like that anymore with Mom and Dad. They lived in San Francisco now, where it didn’t even snow. So while the other Emotions were watching
Riley on the big screen, I tiptoed to the memory sphere and touched it.

On the big screen, the image turned blue. Riley’s voice got sad and small.

I felt awful when Joy spun around and saw me touching the memory. She looked really upset.

“Sadness!” she snapped. “You touched a memory? We talked about this.”

“Oh, yeah, I know,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”

“Get back in your circle,” she told me.

I didn’t. I didn’t want to be back in my circle. I wanted to be near the memory, even though Joy was trying to eject it.

The memory wouldn’t come loose. It stayed put and it stayed sad, and Riley got more and more upset as she thought about it. All the other Emotions got worried because Riley sounded like
she was about to cry, and the kids in her class started whispering about her, but was it really so bad that they knew Riley was unhappy? I didn’t think so.

As the other Emotions tried to remove the memory from the projector, I walked over to the console and began driving. That’s when a new memory sphere was created. It was a bright blue
memory of that very moment, and it rolled into Headquarters and toward the core memory holder.

It was a core memory. A sad core memory. I’d made a core memory of my very own.

“No, wait…” Joy said. “Stop it…no! Aaah!”

She ran to the core memory holder and popped it up so my core memory bounced off the edge and wouldn’t go in. But it was supposed to be there. What Joy had done wasn’t fair. Then Joy
tried to vacuum up the memory, but that would have been even less right. Joy might not have liked the memory, but it was a real core memory. She couldn’t just vacuum it away.

“Joy, no,” I tried to stop her. I grabbed the memory. “That’s a core memory!”

“Hey! Stop it!” Joy said as she tried to pull it away from me.

As we were playing tug-of-war with the blue core memory, we bumped into the open core memory holder and all five of the yellow core memories tumbled to the ground.

Everyone gasped, and while Joy raced around for the five yellow core memories, I grabbed my blue one. It was special to me, and I wanted it where it belonged, in the holder. But then Joy lunged
for it, and it slipped out of my hands and into the vacuum tube. I tried to get it again, but Joy tried to block me, and then she tripped, and then the core memories spilled out of her arms. It was
all really confusing. One minute Joy and I were fighting over the core memories, and the next minute those memories, plus Joy and myself, were sucked up into the vacuum tube.

It was very disorienting for a while then. I was in the tube, I was moving quickly…and then I fell and landed right beside Joy.

Joy immediately got up and began scrambling around. She was looking for her core memories, I guess, and she found all five. Then she looked around to see where we were.

“Long Term Memory,” she said.

I followed her gaze. We were close to Goofball Island, but it was dark and silent. All the Personality Islands would be dark now, because the core memories that powered them weren’t in
their holder. “This is bad,” I said.

But Joy said she could fix everything. We just had to get back to Headquarters, plug in the core memories, and Riley would be back to normal.

If only it could be that easy. Then something horrible dawned on me. Since Joy wasn’t in Headquarters, there was no way Riley could be happy! “We gotta get you back up there,”
I told Joy.

We headed for the bridge to Goofball Island. From there we could cross the lightline back to Headquarters. But once we got to Goofball and took a look at that very thin lightline that spanned
across the deep abyss of the Memory Dump, we had second thoughts about our plan. “If we fall, we’ll be forgotten forever!” I told Joy.

“We have to do this, for Riley. Just follow my footsteps,” Joy said.

It was like walking on a tightrope! I just knew something bad was going to happen. Joy was going to drop one of the core memories, or I was going to stumble and fall into the Memory Dump myself.
I’ve never had good balance. I usually trip over my own feet and land on my face. That’s why I just lie down flat on my face on my own. I keep myself from falling that way.

And sure enough, something bad
did
happen. As we were walking along the lightline, I heard a terrible noise, and then Goofball Island and the lightline that we were standing on began to
crumble!

“Go back! Run!” yelled Joy.

We raced as fast as we could back across the bridge. We made it back to the Long Term Memory cliff seconds before all of Goofball Island collapsed into the Memory Dump.

“We lost Goofball Island. That means Riley can lose Friendship, and Hockey, and Honesty, and Family! You can fix this, right Joy?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Joy replied. “But we have to try.”

She then came up with a new plan. The sky had just become dark, which meant Riley had just gone to sleep. That would give us time to walk to Friendship Island and cross the lightline from there.
But I looked out at Friendship Island and knew we’d never make it. It was impossible. I wanted to give up and fall on the ground.

“No, no, no, don’t obsess over the weight of life’s problems,” Joy told me.

But it was too late. I fell flat on my face.

“Uhhh, Sadness, we don’t have time for this,” Joy said as she walked toward the winding Long Term Memory shelves. She was going to walk through Long Term to get to Friendship
Island.

“Wait! Joy, you could get lost in there!” I cried.

“Think positive!” she said.

I was thinking positive. I was positive that she was going to get lost in there. I knew from all those mind manuals I read back in Headquarters that Long Term was just one endless warren of
corridors and shelves. When I told Joy about the mind manuals and how I knew the way back to Headquarters, she got really excited. She called me the “Official Mind Map.”

“I wish I had a name like that!” said Joy. “How does it feel?”

“Good.”

Joy told me to lead the way. And I was going to, but there was just one problem. I was too sad to walk. I needed at least a few hours to pull myself out of my downward spiral.

Apparently, Joy couldn’t wait that long. She grabbed one of my legs and dragged me into the maze of Long Term Memory shelves. It actually felt kind of nice, especially since I could run my
hand along the bottom row of memories as I slid past them. They turned a really pretty shade of blue when I touched them. I liked it a lot, but I was glad Joy was facing forward and couldn’t
see. I didn’t think she’d approve.

“Which way?” Joy asked when we came to a crossing. “Left?”

“Right.”

She turned right.

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

“Okay! Here we go. This is working!” said Joy, enthusiastic as always.

But then hours passed…

“This is not working,” she said.

I continued giving her directions. “Just another right…and a left. Then another left…and a right…”

“Are you sure you know where we’re going? Because we seem to be walking away from Headquarters—”

Joy paused and looked up. The sky was bright again, which meant Riley was awake. She was distracted for a moment and dropped the core memories. My immediate reaction was to reach out for
them.

“Ah, ah, ah, don’t touch, remember?” Joy told me. “If you touch them, they stay sad!”

“Oh, sorry, I won’t,” I said.

Then Joy noticed the long trail of blue memory spheres on the bottom row of all the shelves we had passed. “Ugh, I can’t take more of this,” she muttered.

Then Joy heard some voices and she ran off. I knew from my manual reading that the voices belonged to Forgetters. Those are the Mind Workers who go through the Long Term Memory shelves and send
all the memories Riley doesn’t need anymore down to the dump, where the memories fade away forever. That was sad to think about, so I let Joy go to the Forgetters on her own. But when I heard
a loud, terrible noise, I got up and walked toward it. Joy had done the same thing. I found her staring out past the Long Term Memory shelves to the place where Friendship Island was breaking into
pieces and toppling to the ground.

“Oh, Riley loved that one. And now it’s gone,” I said. “Good-bye friendship, hello loneliness.”

Joy pointed to Hockey Island, which was the closest island, even though it was very far away. “We’ll just have to go the long way.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “The long…long…long…long way. I’m ready.”

I got back down on the floor and lifted my leg so she could drag me, but then Joy ran off again. I found her talking to a strange-looking guy with a trunk, whiskers, and paws. I recognized him.
He was Bing Bong, Riley’s old imaginary friend, but there was something I had never understood about him.

“What are you supposed to be?” I asked.

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

Bing Bong seemed nice. He gave Joy a bag to help her carry the core memories. And he was willing to help us get to Headquarters. He thought we should take the Train of Thought, which sounded
like a smart idea since it went up to Headquarters all the time.

“I know a shortcut,” he said. “Come on, this way!”

We followed him, but I didn’t like the idea of a shortcut. It sounded risky.

Bing Bong led Joy and me to a warehouse. We could see through a door all the way to a window on the building’s other side. The train station was right outside that window.

“The station is right through here,” Bing Bong said. He opened the door. “After you.”

“Joy!” I cried, stopping her.

“What?”

“I read about this place in the manual,” I told her. “We shouldn’t go in there, that’s a bad idea.”

“Bing Bong says it’s the quickest way to Headquarters,” said Joy.

“No, this is Abstract Thought,” I explained. “Let’s go around. This way,” I said, pulling Joy’s arm.

“What are you talking about?” Bing Bong asked. “I go in here all the time. It’s a shortcut, you see?” He pointed to a sign above the door and spelled it out.
“D-A-N-G-E-R, ‘shortcut.’ I’ll prove it to you.”

I was pretty sure he hadn’t spelled “shortcut,” but he went inside and Joy followed, so I went in, too. I didn’t like it, though. And I liked it even less when the lights
popped on and shapes floated off the floor and into space.

“Say,” Bing Bong said, “would you look at that.”

“Oh, no,” I said, realizing someone must have just activated the room.

I looked over at Bing Bong. His face had turned weird-looking. Like a dream version of his face. Joy and I both screamed, which made Bing Bong touch his face and realize what had happened.

“My face!” he wailed. “My beautiful face!”

“What is going on?” Joy cried.

I told her. “We’re abstracting! There are four stages. This is the first: nonobjective fragmentation!”

We tried to walk across the building, but we didn’t have joints anymore, so it was pretty hard.

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

Then his arm fell off. Joy’s head fell off next. Then I lost my leg. I toppled after it.

“We’re in the second stage,” I pointed out. “We’re deconstructing!”

“Ah!” Bing Bong screamed. “Run!”

I don’t like running, but I would have. It was just difficult when we didn’t have all of our body parts.

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

“Stuck?” Joy wailed. “Why did we come in here?”

“I told you,” Bing Bong said, “it’s a shortcut!”

Through the window, we saw the Train of Thought pull into the station…just as we popped into flat, colored shapes.

“Oh, no,” I moaned. “We’re two-dimensional! That’s stage three!”

“Depth!” Bing Bong cried. “I’m lacking depth!”

We still tried to make it to the window, but it was so hard.

“We’re getting nowhere!” Joy cried.

Then we abstracted into blobs.

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

“We’re not going to make it!” Bing Bong declared.

I was too sad to deal. I slumped to the ground and became a line.

A line! That gave me an idea!

“Wait!” I shouted. “We’re two-dimensional. Fall on your face!”

I crawled like an inchworm, and Joy and Bing Bong did the same. As flat lines, we made our way out the far window. We had finally escaped the Abstract Thought building! The bad news was that we
had just missed the train, but the good news was that we had popped back to our three-dimensional selves.

“I thought you said that was a shortcut,” Joy said to Bing Bong.

“I did, but wow, we should
not
have gone in there,” Bing Bong admitted. “That was dangerous! They really should put up a sign.”

Bing Bong explained that there was another train station on the other side of Imagination Land. Joy wasn’t so sure about his navigation skills after he brought us through Abstract Thought,
though, so she turned to me and whispered, “Is there really another station?”