Ignatius MacFarland (15 page)

“What happened?” I asked as Foo lifted her head and looked around.

“They built a safety net system when Karen started living here. They were afraid that the railing would break someday and she would fall.”

“Did she?” I asked, hoping more than anything that Foo’s answer would be yes. I really didn’t want to be the first idiot to fall out of the treetop city.

“No,” said Foo. “You’re the first one.”

Oh, man. How embarrassing.

We heard a meow.

“What was that?” asked Foo.

“Oh. I think that’s just my cat . . . dog . . . thing,” I said, not really sure what to call it. We both looked down through the net and saw the cat who thought it was a dog ten feet below us looking up from the ground, wagging its tail.

I turned and looked back at Foo. It was only then that both she and I seemed to realize at the exact same moment that she, a very pretty girl, was lying on top of
me
, a sort of dorky guy, and that our faces were close together enough to either tell each other a secret or to kiss. I can’t speak for how this affected her but I can tell you that it made my brain suddenly explode. My heart started pounding like some tiny person with a sledgehammer was trapped inside my chest and was trying to break through the inside of my rib cage to escape.

Foo sort of looked embarrassed that she was on top of me but also didn’t jump up to get off of me, either, the way I imagine any other girl I’ve known in my life would if they ended up anywhere near this close to me. Instead, she raised herself up on her arms and looked at me again.

“You’re lumpy,” she said with a bit of a smile.

Before I could panic too much about exactly what she might mean by that, she started lightly poking my chest and shoulders with her fingers, the way you might touch a bed to see how soft it was.

“Is everyone from your world as heavy and solid as you?” she asked innocently. I could imagine somebody who wasn’t as skinny as I was taking that as an insult, but in my short time knowing Foo, I knew she was usually not being mean or sarcastic when she asked those kinds of questions.

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, still very very aware that she was on top of me. “Most people are way heavier than I am. And there’s some guys who are what they call ‘bodybuilders’ and they’re so solid because of all their huge muscles that they become professional wrestlers and then they can hit each other with metal folding chairs and wooden tables and not even get hurt. Although most people think stuff like that is fake. Wrestling, that is.”

She was staring at me strangely as I continued my rambling explanation of professional wrestling while I kept asking myself why I was telling her all this. It was like my brain was so desperate not to freak out about having her so close to me that it told my mouth to just come up with whatever it could, no matter how insane it was, just to fill the air with words so that she wouldn’t suddenly decide to get off me and end this extremely great moment in my life.

And it was my fear of her getting up that made me completely unprepared for what she did next.

Foo suddenly held out her hand and gently touched my face, starting at my chin, then brushing her hand lightly over my nose, then across my cheek to my ear, then running her open hand with its long thin fingers up over my eyes and across my forehead, and finally putting her fingers right through my hair. Her face had a slightly perplexed expression, the way you might look if you were trying to figure out what something you were touching was made of. I tried to keep a normal look on my face as if this kind of thing happened to me every day back in my frequency, but the guy with the sledgehammer inside my chest was now using a really huge and powerful jackhammer as he blasted away.

And that was when I heard the voice yell, “FOO!”

Suddenly, Foo jumped like somebody had just shot off a gun behind us and her wings slapped all over my face as she flew off me in a panic. I quickly sat up, too, but because the net I was in was so soft and had so many holes in it I couldn’t do much other than thrash around like a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl.

I saw Herfta and his flying sidekicks speeding through the air toward us from the treetops and Karen staring down at me from the walkway high above as Foo hovered about ten feet over me.

Two of the flying guys came down and looked me over to make sure I was all right as I heard Herfta start
puh
ing and
pah
ing like crazy at Foo. I couldn’t tell what he was saying but it sounded like he was really mad. She kept gesturing toward me with her arms, then pointing up at the treetops, then back at me and the net and I assumed she was telling him what had just happened. But Herfta kept interrupting her and talking in the soft flying-people language so forcefully and angrily that I expected him to just start yelling really loudly in English the way Mr. Gilley, my insane math teacher, did whenever he heard anybody talking in class after he had already warned us to “keep our lousy mouths shut.”

Finally, Foo nodded and stopped trying to explain and then turned and looked at me with sort of a sad, embarrassed look on her face. Herfta looked at me, too, then gestured to Foo to go back up to the treetop city. She nodded and flew back up super fast, like she was trying to disappear off the face of the earth. Then Herfta flew down next to me.

“Are you all right?” he asked in a tone that sounded like he didn’t really care.

“Yes,” I said nervously.

“Good. If I ever catch you with my daughter again, I’ll personally throw you off the walkway. And this time I guarantee there won’t be any safety net to catch you. Got it?”

I nodded yes, feeling a hot flash of panic run up the back of my neck.

Wow, the first girl who ever liked me and now her dad wants to kill me.

This is officially a day of firsts, I thought to myself.

22

UH OH . . .

I had a hard time falling asleep that night. It would have been hard enough to sleep just dealing with the fact that I was trapped in a new world and wasn’t sure if I would see my family and friends ever again. And it would have been just as hard to fall asleep thinking about Foo and how pretty she was and the way she touched my face. But add to that the fact that I now knew Herfta was her dad and that the guy hated me
and
(and this is a big
and
) threatened to
kill
me even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, and you have all the makings of an extremely sleepless night.

None of this was helped by the fact that I was now sleeping in some really small room that wasn’t really even a room but was more like some kind of rickety broom closet made out of sticks. And that I had to sleep on what was pretty much a pile of grass with a ratty old blanket thrown over the top.
And
that I was lonely and wished that the cat had stayed here to keep me company instead of running off into the woods like some big chicken when Herfta and his gang came down to get me.

In my brain I could still hear the
whoosh
of the wooden bowl elevator thingie as it pulled me back up to the treetop city after Herfta had threatened me and how Karen got all mad at me for making Herfta so angry. The more I thought about it the angrier I got. Karen wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t done anything with Foo and that what had happened in the net was all Foo’s doing. I had gotten so mad at Karen for accusing me of being a liar that I called her sort of a rude name and then stormed away and quickly realized I had no place to sleep. And so I told one of Herfta’s men that I needed a room and he stuck me in this crappy place. And now I was supposed to get a good night’s sleep?

Fat chance.

Since I didn’t have a watch and since my cell phone was dead, I don’t really know what time I fell asleep. But I do know that once I finally did, I slept that really heavy sleep that you do when you’re way more tired than you thought you were when you got in bed. The last time I slept like that was after my dad made me clean out the garage all day and I fell asleep in the backseat of our car on the way home from dinner and the next thing I knew I was still in the backseat and it was morning. When I came in for breakfast, my mom said she and my dad thought it would be better to let me sleep in the car than to wake me up to go to my bedroom, which sort of made me feel like Gary’s deadbeat uncle Al who used to fall asleep on their front porch. They’d leave him there all night and he’d sleep so deeply that once a bunch of kids covered him with toilet paper and Silly String at two o’clock in the morning and he didn’t even wake up.

As I slept, I dreamed that I was lying in my living room at home and there was a big party going on with all my parents and relatives and friends and they were having a great time around me but I couldn’t get up or talk or even move so that I could join the party. At first they were telling me to get up but after I didn’t move for a while, they just started putting their drinks and paper plates on me and using me like a coffee table. Then Ivan spilled a scalding hot chocolate all over my stomach and I was trying to scream but couldn’t and all of a sudden there was a pounding on our front door and everybody started running because it was the police and they were pounding on the door harder and harder and harder and the room started shaking and all my mom’s ceramic animals and dolls that she had on shelves around our living room starting falling and breaking and all of a sudden I woke up and discovered that the pounding and shaking wasn’t just in my dream.

The whole room
was
shaking.

Dust and twigs and leaves were falling from the ceiling down on top of me. I heard yelling and wings flapping and birdlike screeches and it sounded like there was a major panic going on outside. Before I could even jump out of bed, Karen stuck her head into the room from outside. She had a look on her face that said something really bad was happening.

And it was.

“They’re here!” she yelled at me.

“Who’s here?” I asked, feeling all shaky from having woken up so fast.

“Arthur’s army! They’re trying to destroy the city.”

“What city?”

“THIS city!” And with that, Karen disappeared again.

A big boom shook the room so violently that I fell out of my bed. Completely off balance and tripping over my feet because my body hadn’t fully woken up yet, I jumped up and ran out the door after Karen. The minute I got outside there was another huge explosion and I fell against the building. Suddenly worried that I might fall off the walkway
again
, I crouched down on my hands and knees, crawled to the edge, and looked down.

Around the base of the trees, I saw a massive swarm of creatures wearing the uniforms of Mr. Arthur’s army. It looked like there were thousands of them spread out in all directions. Every tree had at least ten or twenty creatures around it swinging axes and hitting the trunks with anything that could cut the trees down.

At the bottom of my tree, which had the biggest and thickest trunk, I saw the creatures stuffing what looked like explosives into a huge hole that they had chopped into its base. The creatures then all ran back and BOOM! An explosion of wood and smoke and debris blew out of the hole, knocking the creatures off their feet.

The whole tree shook again like a giant had just kicked it with his huge foot. The walkway jolted and I was thrown up and back against the building again. However, since the walls of the building were only made out of twigs, I crashed halfway through it and found myself practically impaled by some thicker branches that were in the lower half of the wall.

I looked up and saw tons of flying people in the sky, looking completely freaked out and confused. I struggled to my feet and heard a massive cracking sound as the tree slowly started to tip sideways. I could hear all kinds of stuff inside the building fall over and start sliding and rolling across the floors. And then
I
started to slide down the walkway. I grabbed onto the wall and held on as I saw that the building on top of the tree next to us was getting closer. At first I thought it was moving toward us but then I quickly realized that we were falling toward it.