Poached

For the Sterns: David, Tara, Marni, and Kira

And the Heisens: Christopher, Laura, Aaron, and Emmett

And Adam Zarembok

I'd like to thank Jason Jacobs at the Los Angeles Zoo for answering all of my koala questions, no matter how strange they probably seemed to him at the time.

Thanks to David Stern, who has helped me with so many jokes over the years, like the “Baron Wasteland” one in this book.

I'd also like to give a very special thanks to my children, who are now getting old enough to influence the tales I tell. My son Dashiell's fascination with sharks (particularly bull sharks) inspired many of the scenes in this book. And my daughter, Violet, who loves the zoo as much as I do, was always thrilled to join me on research trips to visit the koalas. (Of course, I was always equally thrilled to have her along as well.) I love you both more than words can say.

I would never have been
accused of stealing the koala if Vance Jessup hadn't made me drop a human arm in the shark tank.

It wasn't a
real
human arm. It was a plastic one Vance had stolen from a department-store mannequin. But it
looked
real enough through the glass of the tank, which was how all the trouble started.

Vance was the toughest, meanest kid at my middle school. He was in the eighth grade, but he'd been held back. Twice. Which made him a fifteen-year-old eighth grader. Plus, he was big for his age, nearly six feet tall with biceps as thick as Burmese pythons. Every other kid looked like a dwarf next to him.

There was a very long list of things I didn't like about
Lyndon B. Johnson Middle School, but Vance was at the top of it. He'd been bullying me since my first day of seventh grade—and it was now mid-December. I didn't know what he had against me. Maybe it was because I was new at the school and thus fresh meat. Or maybe it was that, having spent most of my childhood in the Congo, I was different from all the other kids. Whatever the case, Vance homed in on me like he was a lion and I was the weakest wildebeest in the herd.

Vance stole my lunch. He gave me wedgies. He flushed my homework down the toilet. I reported these incidents to my parents, who angrily informed the school principal, Mr. Dillnut. Unfortunately, Mr. Dillnut was afraid of Vance himself. So he merely threatened Vance with detention—and then ratted me out as the kid who'd squealed. If anything, this made Vance even
more
determined to harass me. And now he warned that if I ever got him sent to the principal again, he'd hurt me.

So I fought back the only way I knew how: I played pranks on him. Covertly, of course. I filled his locker with aerosol cheese. I submerged a dead roach in his chocolate pudding. I caught a king snake and hid it in his gym bag. That one worked out the best. Vance was changing in the boys' locker room when the snake popped out and scared him silly. Vance shrieked like a girl and fled into the gym,
forgetting that he was only in his underwear until he found himself face-to-face with the entire cheerleading squad.

Unfortunately, the snake tipped my hand. I'd kept my identity as the prankster secret until that point, but I was well-known at school for being good with animals. My mother was a world-famous primatologist, my father was a world-famous wildlife photographer, and I lived with both of them at FunJungle, the world's largest zoo. Vance quickly deduced that I'd planted the snake and came looking for payback.

He found me in the cafeteria on Monday, having lunch with Xavier Gonzalez. Xavier was my best friend at school. In fact he was my only friend at school. He was an outsider too, a smart kid who'd once made the terrible social error of admitting that he actually enjoyed his classes. Before I'd come along, Xavier had been Vance's favorite target.

There was a distinct hierarchy to the seating in the school cafeteria. The coolest kids, known as the Royals, sat in the center, where they could be seen and admired. These were the eighth-grade jocks and cheerleaders, plus a few rich kids. They were surrounded by the Lower Royals: the younger jocks, cheerleaders, and rich kids who would assume the throne someday. Then came almost everyone else: the normal kids who hoped to be popular, but knew it would probably never
happen. At the very corners sat the lowest of the low, whom even the normal kids looked down on: the losers, loners, and freaks who hadn't mastered how to fit in.

I had spent every lunch so far in one of the corners with Xavier. So it wasn't hard for Vance to find me.

As usual, Xavier and I were talking about FunJungle. Most of my fellow students liked FunJungle—after all, it was the biggest tourist attraction in all of Central Texas—but Xavier was a FunJungle fanatic. He had more than twenty different FunJungle T-shirts (not to mention sweatshirts, caps, pins, and other assorted merchandise) and claimed that the day the park had opened was the greatest day of his life. He wanted to be a field biologist when he grew up and idolized my mother the way other kids revered rock stars. He'd read everything he could find about her, so he knew all about me before I'd even set foot in the school. He'd sought me out on my first day at Lyndon B. Johnson, wanting to know if I could introduce him to Mom.

Xavier generally spent every lunch peppering me with questions about FunJungle. The day that Vance came after me, we happened to be talking about Shark Odyssey, which was one of the more popular exhibits. It was a huge aquarium with a glass tunnel running through it, from which guests could watch sharks swimming all around them.

“Doesn't that drive the sharks crazy?” Xavier wanted to
know. “It must be like waving red meat in front of a bear.”

“Sharks don't really eat humans,” I told him. “In fact, most attacks seem to be accidents. The sharks usually spit the humans back out after biting them.”

“I know,” Xavier said. “But still, they're hunters, right? And now all these humans are moving right through their habitat. It must trigger some sort of primal instinct.”

I shook my head. “No. In the first place, the glass tunnel is lined with some kind of reflective surface, so the sharks can't see the humans from inside. And even if they could, sharks don't really hunt by sight. They hunt by smell—and by sensing vibrations in the water. You could drop a whole mannequin in the shark tank and the sharks probably wouldn't even give it a second look.”

“I bet it'd freak the guests out, though,” Xavier laughed.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It would be pretty funny.”

Xavier stopped laughing at that point, which I should have taken as a sign that something was wrong, but I was too caught up thinking about the prank. I kept rambling on, unaware that Vance Jessup was bearing down on me. “Know what would
really
freak the guests out? If you only put
part
of a mannequin in the tank. Like just an arm. So it'd look like the sharks had already eaten the rest.
That
would be hilarious.”

Now
, Vance decided to make his presence known. He grabbed my chair and spun me around to face him. “What
would be hilarious?” he demanded. “Are you planning another prank on me?”

I gulped, terrified, and did my best to lie to Vance's face. “What are you talking about? I've never played
any
pranks on you.”

“I know you put that snake in my gym bag, Monkey Boy. And you're gonna pay for it.” Vance held up a clenched fist the size of a grapefruit.

I recoiled, aware this wasn't an idle threat. Vance got in fights almost every day—and usually won. He was covered with bruises, scratches, and scrapes, though his opponents generally looked far worse. He was currently sporting a half dozen Band-Aids dappled with blood that was probably someone else's.

Meanwhile, I'd never been in a fight in my life. I wouldn't stand a chance against Vance.

“Teddy wasn't talking about playing a prank on
you
,” Xavier said quickly, trying to bail me out. “He was talking about playing a prank at FunJungle. Dropping a fake human arm into the shark tank to make all the guests freak out.”

Vance lowered his fist. His sneer faded and he made a strange noise. At first I thought he was choking—but then realized he was laughing. “That
would
be funny,” he said. “When are you going to do it?”

“Er . . . never,” I said. “I only meant it would be funny
in
theory
. I would never really do something like that. It might start a panic—”

“Exactly,” Vance said, and then laughed again. “Let's do it after school tomorrow.”

I shook my head and tried to come up with a believable excuse. “Sorry, but it's not possible. There's a ton of security at FunJungle. They'd catch us if we tried to sneak the arm inside.”

“No, they'd catch
me
if I tried to sneak the arm inside,” Vance corrected. “Not you. You don't have to go through the main entrance.”

I winced. I hadn't expected Vance to know that. I struggled to come up with something else. “We don't have a fake arm, either . . .”

“Leave that to me,” Vance said. “I can steal one from the department store in town.”

“You know, now that I think about it,” I said, “I don't think this would be that good a prank at all. But I'll tell you what might be a lot more fun. Maybe I could get you a backstage tour of the shark exhibit. It's pretty fascinating. . . .”

Vance's eyes narrowed in anger. “I don't want a tour of some dumb shark tank.”

“Oh, it's not dumb,” Xavier put in, trying to be helpful. “It's actually quite amazing. In fact, it's the largest shark tank in the world, housing over thirty different species—”

“Shut up,” Vance told him.

“Okay,” Xavier said, backing down.

Vance clamped a hand on my shoulder. “I want to play this prank,” he informed me. “And I need your help to do it. So you're going to help me, right?”