Driven by Emotions (7 page)

“Good going, Sadness,” I said. “Now when Riley thinks of that moment with Dad, she’s gonna feel sad. Bravo.”

Sadness had never done much around Headquarters before. Seriously, she was like this blue lump. And not only did she leave puddles of tears on the ground, she was starting to change happy
memories to sad ones! Gross. I totally got it when Joy told Sadness to keep her paws
off
the memories.

At the same time, if Sadness was freaking out, I totally got
that
, too. I didn’t like anything about this move, either. And that night, instead of sleeping in her own beautiful room
back in Minnesota, Riley was in a sleeping bag on the floor of her new tiny, dust-covered, mouse-apocalypse room. Ugh! I was over it. Totally over it. Then Mom came in to kiss Riley good night, and
she was all, “Thanks, Riley, for being so happy when our whole life rots and we made this hideous decision to move to this place of doom.” I might be paraphrasing. Point is, she was
pretty cool about Riley’s attitude in the face of all this change and upheaval, so I felt like Joy knew what she was doing with her whole stay-happy-no-matter-what deal.

I went to bed after that. Any time I could spend not awake in San Fran-
sick-
o was time well spent. Plus I needed the rest. The next day was the first day of school, which is basically a
giant experiment in social horror. I had to get Riley completely prepared with the right outfit and the right things to say if she was going to get in with the cool kids and have any kind of life
whatsoever.

The next morning, we all rallied in Headquarters, and Joy gave us jobs.

“Disgust,” she said, “make sure Riley stands out today…but also blends in.”

Oh, please. Like I wasn’t already on that like algae on an unclean pool.

“When I’m through,” I said, “Riley will look so good the other kids will look at their own outfits and barf.”

I
totally
delivered. Riley had a super-cute outfit, a cool backpack with a funky pattern, and great styled hair that bounced from side to side as she walked. Riley walked into the school
with confidence and just enough swagger to
intrigue
other kids, not turn them off. She had a smile that said “I’m fun” as opposed to “I’m desperate.” She
was ready.

“Okay, we’ve got a group of cool girls at two o’clock,” I said as I watched Riley’s progress on the big screen.

“How do you know?” Joy asked.

“Double ears pierced, infinity scarf…” Please. It was so obvious. Then they turned and looked at us, and one of them was wearing eye shadow. “Yeah,” I told Joy,
“we want to be friends with them.”

Then Joy said she wanted to go talk with them! And I was like, “Are you kidding? We’re not
talking
to them. We want them to like us!”

Riley had a shot at it, too. She was playing it totally cool. Even when the ridiculous teacher put her through the torture of talking about herself in front of the entire
class—whatever—Joy had it under control. She recalled a memory of Riley and her parents skating together. Then Riley started talking about Minnesota, and playing hockey. It scored major
cool-girl points, I could tell.

Then, out of nowhere, she got all sniffly and sad.

“We go out on the lake almost every weekend. Or we did,” Riley said, “‘until I moved away.”

Our view screen in Headquarters turned completely blue. We all spun around, and
Sadness
had her hands on the memory sphere. Like, what was she thinking?! You couldn’t make Riley
sad
at a pivotal moment like this! She was practically on stage, auditioning to be part of the social hierarchy, and thanks to Sadness, she was now totally blowing it. Joy frantically pushed
buttons on the console to remove the sphere from the projector, but it wouldn’t budge! And Riley was falling apart.

“We used to play tag and stuff…” she sniffed.

Tag?! You don’t talk about a baby game to your new classmates! I scanned the room around Riley. It was bad.

“Cool kids whispering at three o’clock,” I said.

Somebody had to do something. Joy, Fear, Anger, and I tried to pull the stuck memory from the projector, but it wouldn’t budge!

Riley, meanwhile? Full-on sobfest.
Very bad
. It was a moment that everyone watching would still be talking about at their twenty-year high school reunion. “Remember that lame kid
who sobbed in front of us on her first day of school?”

Yeah, that’s where we were headed. And to cap it off, Sadness was now driving the console. Joy finally yanked the stuck memory out of the projector and pulled Sadness off the console.
That’s when it happened. Oh, yeah. We all saw it roll into Headquarters.

“It’s a core memory!” Fear wailed.

“But it’s
blue
!” I sneered. I mean, seriously, since when does Riley have blue core memories? She doesn’t. They’re all yellow. Blue doesn’t even go
with the color scheme in the core memory holder. Clearly Joy agreed with me, because she ran to the core memory holder and popped it up, causing the sphere to hit the edge and roll back.

Then she grabbed the blue core memory and pushed a button to lower the vacuum tube that sends all the memories down to Long Term. She was going to get rid of it! But then Sadness tried to grab
it back from her. It got so crazy between them that they—and you’re not going to believe this—bumped the core memory holder and
the five core memories spilled out
.

It was totally freaky to see them rolling around on the floor. I screamed, and not much outside a bloody hangnail makes me scream. Then
all
of Riley’s Islands of Personality went
dark. And that was a huge problem. The islands make Riley
Riley.
If they were down, who would she become? It was true horror movie material. And since horror movies are generally gross, I
really didn’t like where things seemed to be heading.

I didn’t know what to do. I watched as Joy scrambled to gather the five yellow core memories. Sadness grabbed the new blue one and tried to put it into the core memory holder, but Joy
lunged at her! As they began pushing each other back and forth, they got super close to the vacuum tube…

And then they both got sucked inside!

For a moment, I thought they’d get stuck and plug it up, but they didn’t. They disappeared completely. Who knew where they’d end up…somewhere deep in the Mind World.

Fear, Anger, and I just stood there for a minute, watching the spot where they’d left.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Anger finally roared. “They left us here with a whole ruined school day to handle!”

“I know what to do!” Fear cried. “Let’s curl up in the fetal position and hide!”

That’s what he did. Curled up in a ball and shut his eyes, because I guess he figured if he couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see him. Whatever.

“You’re not hiding, Fear,” I said. “Come on, we have to take the controls until Joy comes back.”

“
Will
she come back?” Fear asked. “
WILL
she?!”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course she will. Where else would she go?”

And seriously, in the meantime, we needed to do something about Riley. After a little maneuvering, we got her sitting back at her desk and had her disappear in a book. It was a textbook, which
wasn’t ideal. I’d rather she’d had her nose in some super-hip postapocalyptic novel, ideally one that was made into a movie, but we used what we had.

Honestly, we didn’t have a lot of time to take stock and think until Riley was having dinner. Up until then we were just working overtime to get her through the school day. Anger had her
snap at a bunch of kids who kept tapping their pencils on the desk, Fear got her all freaked out when she found cobwebs in her locker, and don’t even get me started on how I handled the
cafeteria lunch at Riley’s new school. Tortilla soup? A tortilla is a flat slice of not-bread. How do you make it into a soup? Even if you pounded it up and pulverized it into a soup, you
wouldn’t get cheese and red goo out of it. What is the red goo, anyway? Thank goodness I’m here to ask these questions.

Then came dinnertime. Joy and Sadness still weren’t back, so it was just me, Fear, and Anger in a Headquarters that felt completely bleak with no core memories. Not a pleasant work
environment, and I made sure Anger and Fear knew I was working under duress in less than ideal conditions.

Fear had a brilliant idea, and by brilliant, I mean absurd. He said all we had to do until Joy got back was to be just like her. “Just do what Joy would do,” he said.

“Great idea,” I muttered. “How are WE supposed to be happy?”

Before we could figure that out, Mom started yammering about a new hockey team and tryouts tomorrow. She needed a response. Anger looked at me, like I would know what to do.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“You pretend to be Joy,” said Fear.

Ugh. Gag me. But Fear pushed me to the console, so I had no choice. “Fine,” I said. “Whatever.” I took the controls, and when Mom started getting giggly about hockey
again—like we’d even care about hockey after the day we’d had—I had Riley roll her eyes and say, “Oh, yeah, that sounds fantastic.” Then Fear got all up in my
grill because I didn’t sound like Joy, but for real—I’m
not
Joy.

I thought that would be it, but Mom didn’t give up. She thought something was wrong with Riley—which, hello, it totally was, but Mom would never understand. She started asking lots
of questions and looking for deep, meaningful answers. I was over it, so I turned the controls to Fear. Let him be Joy and see how it worked for
him
.

In a word? It didn’t. Mom asked how school was and Fear had Riley basically curl up in a ball and hide.

“It was fine, I guess. I don’t know,” she said.

Pretty much
just
like Joy. Not. So then Anger tried to be Joy. That caused a full-on meltdown that got Riley sent to her room without dessert. Complete disaster. Then, a little later that
night, Dad came into her room to try to make things better. He started acting silly and goofy, which normally would start up Goofball Island, but Goofball Island was dark. And you know what happens
when you start up a broken island?

Of course you don’t. I didn’t either. Turns out it crumbles and falls to pieces. We saw it all happen from Headquarters. So that left Riley’s mind filled with what? Rubble.
Rubble in her head. How gross is that?
Clearly
we needed Joy back. She’d know how to de-rubble-ify the place. Without her, we were just winging it, and I don’t do the improv
thing.

Still, we had to try to keep things together. So that night, when Riley’s best friend from home, Meg, called Riley on her laptop, Fear, Anger, and I were ready at the console. I figured it
would be easy girl stuff, nothing too difficult. I mean, Riley and Meg had known each other forever. We could handle a simple conversation.

But then you know what Meg said? Riley asked about the hockey play-offs because she and Meg had been on the same team, and Meg was all, “Oh, we’ve got this new girl on the team.
She’s so cool.”

She was saying that to us for real? How gross is that? Just throw your new BFF in our face, am I right? Anger was furious. Fear was freaking out. I was nauseated, but I tried to keep it under
control because I could see out the window that Friendship Island was having a minor earthquake over the conversation and was in major danger of crumbling.

No use. Meg got Anger too furious. I saw it coming the minute Meg said, “We can pass the puck to each other without even looking. It’s like mind reading.”

“You like to read minds, Meg?” Anger roared. “I got something for you to read, right here!”

“Hey, hey, no!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

Anger had Riley yell and slam her computer shut…and we lost Friendship Island. More mind rubble.

The next day we had school again. Seriously? Who came up with the whole school-five-days-a-week thing? I mean, it’s overkill. Riley already needed a weekend to decompress. Instead, she had
to trudge through this sea of judging kids. Each one of them stopped to point and gawk at the new kid who cried in class.

Yeah, okay, maybe they didn’t
actually
stop and point, but mentally they did. I could see it in their eyes. Especially the cool girls’ eyes. They had no clue how awesome Riley
really was, and they were never going to give us a chance to prove it. Not anymore.

I couldn’t let Riley deal with that nonsense. I made sure she brought a book along to school. A good book—some giant intimidating-looking thing Mom had brought from home in the
station wagon. I had Riley pull it out before each class and act like she was
way
too engrossed to care that no one wanted to talk to her. It worked for lunch, too. She sat on a bench all by
herself and kept her nose in that book while she picked at the cafeteria slop. That way everyone knew she was way too cool to care what a bunch of kids thought about her.

The book thing worked for school, but after school we had to deal with something more challenging: those hockey tryouts Mom had been talking about the night before. Tryouts might have been fine
if Riley had her core memories and Hockey Island was still running, but she didn’t and it wasn’t. It was dark. So Fear, Anger, and I knew what would happen if Riley attempted to play
hockey. It was going to get real ugly, real quick.

When we arrived at the hockey rink, I quickly looked around. I didn’t see any of the cool kids there. At least that was a relief. I did
not
want them to see what was about to happen
to Riley.

“Good luck, sweetie!” Mom cheered as Riley took the ice.

“Luck isn’t going to help us now,” I told Anger and Fear. “If she tries to use Hockey Island, it’s going down.”

That’s how it seemed to work. If Riley tried to activate an island without the core memory to power it, the whole island would crumble.

But Fear had a solution. He had recalled every hockey memory he could think of to take the place of the core memory. Yep, he had us knee-deep in memory spheres.

“One of these has got to work in place of the core memory,” Fear said.