We Give a Squid a Wedgie (29 page)

Celia felt a tugging at her stomach, and the bitter taste of adrenaline rose at the back of her mouth. She had to do something. She heard her brother’s screams across the water. She thought of those hours of
The
Squid Whisperer
he’d made her watch. She had no idea how to get a squid’s attention, but she put her fingers to her lips and blew out as loud and as long of a whistle as she could.

“What did you hope that would do?” Sir Edmund laughed. He was about to order his crew to surround the escaped prisoners when the words froze on his lips.

The kraken dropped Dr. Navel and vanished beneath the surface. Celia relaxed as she saw her father­ hoisting himself back onto the wreck of his raft. Celia noticed that it appeared to have been made entirely out of garbage. No wonder the giant squid ripped it apart so easily.

“How did you do that?” Professor Rasmali-Greenberg asked.

“I don’t know,” Celia told him. “I just panicked and whistling seemed like the thing to do. I didn’t have a bagpipe.”

The professor lowered his eyebrows, wondering what a bagpipe had to do with anything (he had never seen
The Squid Whisperer
). Then he pointed to the sea.

“I fear you’ve done more than you bargained for,” he told Celia.

Giant shadows rose from the depths all around Sir Edmund’s ship, their eight humongous arms spreading wide as they neared the surface.

“The baby’s coming back!” one of the crewmen shouted and pointed at the water, where indeed the kraken was racing back toward their ship.

“That one was a baby?” said Celia. “You kidnapped a baby kraken!” she yelled at Sir Edmund. He shrugged. It wasn’t the first time he had kidnapped a baby mythical creature. It was kind of his hobby.

“They’re attacking!” Janice yelled as the whole family of giant squid raised their tentacles from the sea.

We should not be surprised to note that Sir ­Edmund did not pay his crew nearly well enough
for calm and discipline to prevail under attack from a pod of mythical sea creatures. A lone kraken had been known to drag ships down to the bottom of the sea for the sheer joy of it. There was no telling what a family of kraken bent on revenge would do. Sir Edmund’s crew were neither explorers awed by the majesty of the sea nor warriors daring to face the beast and conquer it like heroes from ­storybooks.

To put it more bluntly, as the krakens’ dark shapes blossomed underneath the research vessel
Serenity
, everyone went crazy.

Members of the crew scrambled, bumping into each other and climbing over each other and punching each other in the nose to get to safety. All thoughts of locking the escaped prisoners up again were quickly forgotten.

Sir Edmund stood with Janice by his side, his mouth agape, watching the sea creatures lay siege to his boat.

“We have to do something!” cried Janice. “Call them off! Don’t they obey you?”

Sir Edmund didn’t answer her. His mouth hung open, his arms hung limp at his sides. His plans were falling apart.

He was, in a word, nonplussed.

The first of the creatures’ tentacles wrapped around the bow of the ship and yanked it down toward the water. Sir Edmund grabbed the railing, ignoring the shrieks of his crew as kraken snatched them up with other tentacles. As one long, slimy, tooth-encrusted tentacle reared above him, he broke out of his stupor and dove to the side. The tentacle smashed the railing where he’d been standing and ripped it right off the boat.

“AHH!” his first mate screamed, hauled into the air in a coil of the monster’s arm. Another kraken had begun tearing apart the back of the boat, opening a huge hole in the side, where water rushed in.

“Impossible!” Sir Edmund shouted, getting to his feet again. He pointed at Celia with eyes ablaze. “Only an heir to Atlantis can command the kraken! And the Council are the only rightful heirs! Tell me how you did that!”

Celia shrugged.

As tentacles ensnared crewmen right and left, it seemed that those around Celia were safe. All around, crewmen were being snatched from the
deck and sucked unceremoniously beneath the waves. Their screams didn’t even have time to echo.

“You are not an heir to Atlantis!” Sir Edmund shouted, rushing down the stairs to the main deck and waving his finger at Celia, as if she were his greatest concern, not the monsters tearing his ship to shreds and eating his crew. “You are a Navel! And a lazy one at that! You watch too much television!”

“There’s no such thing as too much television,” shouted Celia.

“The kraken are mine! All of them!”

“It sure doesn’t look that way to me,” Celia ­answered, crossing her arms.

The ship tilted dangerously. The kraken had lined up along the starboard side and were slowly rolling the ship over. Their terrible mouths gaped and their cat-yellow eyes gazed up at the terrified crew. Sir Edmund turned and stood directly in front of the row of monsters, unafraid.

“I command you all back to the depths!” he yelled.

They didn’t move.

“I will not stand here and kibitz with you!” he yelled. “Return to the deep!”

“Kibitz?” the professor wondered.

“It means chit-chat,” said Celia. “And we don’t have time for it! This boat is sinking!”

With all the chaos on the ship, one cannot be too certain what happened next, but it appeared that the baby giant squid spat a thick black loogie onto Sir Edmund, covering him from head to toe.

Janice pulled him out of the way just as one of the creature’s tentacles slapped down where he had been standing, tearing into the metal deck with its clawed suckers.

“Trust me,” Janice told Sir Edmund, pulling him along, “you don’t want to stay and chat. Let’s get out of here. Where are the life rafts?”

“There aren’t any,” said Sir Edmund.

“What?” Janice let him go.

“I will not lose my kraken and my ship on the same day!” Sir Edmund declared, wringing thick squid ink out of his mustache. “And I will not lose them because of Celia Navel. She’s a child!”

“She’s a tween,” Janice corrected him.

“What does that even mean? It’s not a real word!”
He didn’t wait for Janice to answer. He ran to the harpoon gun.

Celia knew that the ship was sinking. They needed to get off fast.

But she didn’t see Beverly the lizard and Patrick the monkey anywhere. Oliver would never forgive her if something happened to Beverly. And Patrick was practically a member of the family.

“We can’t leave without the monkey and the lizard,” she said.

“There!” The professor pointed.

Beverly was perched on the harpoon gun, hissing at Sir Edmund, and Patrick had jumped on ­Janice’s back, clawing at her hair.

Celia whistled at them as loud as she could. She figured that if it worked on a kraken, it could work on a monkey and a lizard.

It didn’t.

They ignored her.

The kraken, however, did not. Six pairs of giant eyes turned to look at her.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t whistle at these monsters until you know what you are saying,” suggested the professor.

“Too late,” Celia squeaked. All six giant squid
dragged themselves along the side of the ship until they had come directly to Celia.

“Those are some big calamari,” Celia’s mother whispered.

“So, uh, what do I do?” Celia said, staring into the giant eyes of the kraken. The largest of the giant squid reached out with one of its great tentacles. It didn’t whip it at Celia or encircle her. It simply extended it, stopping just in front of her face.

Celia thought of
Valerie-at-Large
. Even though Valerie would never really be friends with the mean girls in the Six Sisters Club, they shook hands with each other at the end, because they had an understanding. They couldn’t change who they were, but they could change how they treated each other. Celia guessed maybe the kraken felt the same way.

She reached her hand out and touched the tip of its tentacle. It was wet and much harder and rougher than she’d thought it would be, but oddly gentle. It tickled her palm.

“This will teach you to disobey!” Sir Edmund shouted, pointing the harpoon gun right at the biggest sea monster. It looked his way and Celia was
certain she could see its eyes widen with what had to be fear. Sir Edmund was about to fire when, instead, he screamed.

Beverly’s jaws were clamped tight around his ankle.

“Beverly, you traitor!” He groaned as he slumped against the harpoon gun. Even his mustache sagged as her poison began to course through his veins. “I hate lima beans.”

Janice tried to jump to the gun, but Beverly hissed at her and she stopped.

“Good lizard,” she cooed. “Be a nice lizard, good lizard.”

Beverly hissed again and Janice fainted.

“Go,” Celia said to the giant squid. “Go … and … uh, don’t sink any more ships, okay?”

The kraken looked to Celia, then back to Sir Edmund groaning in agony, and then back to Celia. It let go of the ship and slipped back into the ocean, vanishing with one stroke of its eight massive arms. The others followed.

“
Below the thunders of the upper deep; / Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, / His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep, / The Kraken sleepeth : faintest sunlights flee,
” Celia’s mother said.

“Great,” said Celia. “Mom’s crazier than ever.”

“That was from the poet Alfred Tennyson,” said the professor. “He wrote
The Kraken
in 1830.”

“So are we just going to stand here and recite poetry now?” Celia wondered.

“We should get off this ship before Sir Edmund recovers from that bite,” the professor said.

“Sounds good to me,” said Celia. “But how?”

“Maybe your friend can help.” The professor pointed to a small wooden fishing boat sailing up alongside the sinking ship, and Celia’s friend Jabir standing on the bow with his mother, waving.

“NEED A LIFT?”
Celia called out as their boat approached the floating pile of garbage where ­Oliver and Dr. Navel had watched the attack of the kraken unfold.

“Celia!” Dr. Navel clamored to his feet, so happy to see his daughter again that he lost his balance and fell into the water.

Jabir’s mother used a long pole to pull him out again. Dr. Navel hugged Celia, and then he saw his wife.

“Claire!” He knelt in front of her. “Claire?”

“Ogden,” she said dreamily. “Am I still crazy? Is that you or the monkey?”

“It’s me!” he said, embracing and kissing her.

“Gross,” Oliver muttered as he climbed aboard the fishing boat.

“Hi, Oliver,” Jabir said to him.

“Hi,” Oliver answered.

“You dropped our remote control,” Celia told Oliver.

“You talked to a giant squid,” Oliver told her.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

They stared at each other for a while, both of them looking pretty bedraggled from their adventures, and then they hugged. As annoying as it could be to have a twin, they were pretty sure it was much worse not to have one.

“Where’s Corey?” Celia asked, and Oliver shook his head sadly.

“The pirates,” he said.

“Celia, Oliver,” their mother called out. “You’re all right! And you saved us!”

Oliver hugged his mother.

“Are you, like, still crazy?” Celia asked warily.

“I have a headache,” she said. “But I’m feeling fine. The last thing I remember is you, Celia, standing up to Sir Edmund.”

“It didn’t really work, though,” said Celia. “I had to give him Plato’s map.”

Her mother couldn’t hide the worry sweeping across her face.

“I did keep this, though,” Celia said, unzipping her wet suit and pulling out the soaked leather journal.

“You found Percy Fawcett!” Dr. Navel exclaimed.­

“Yeah,” said Celia. “I sort of had to.”

Her father started flipping through the journal. It was hard to read because it had gotten very wet, but he nodded eagerly. “You might just be the greatest explorer in history!”

Oliver stuck his tongue out at her. Jabir smiled at her. Celia managed to scowl at her brother and blush at the same time.

“There are clues in here,” her father said. “We can use this!”