Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters (2 page)

The old man outside doesn't seem to mind the rain. Which is good, because it's raining big, fat drops, more like a waterfall. It's supposed to rain for the next three days, on and on. So much for sunshine and warm beaches.

It hasn't rained like this in years. Not since…well, maybe back when I was just a little kid. When I'd tried to run away from home.

Most four-year-olds wouldn't be ambitious enough to take off down a mountain road, looking for their mom. Especially not on a day when cartoons got interrupted with the loud squeal of an emergency signal. “Flash flood warning in the mountains,” a bored robotic female voice had said. “Severe weather threat until five o'clock.” I had shrugged and turned off the TV, not knowing what a flash flood was. Just that it was raining a lot, which was no big deal to me. My grandmother had talked about how it was the wettest day the county had seen in two decades, during an already wet El Niño rainstorm year, when everything in California stayed green through the summer instead of turning into brown tinder.

But I was a super-sneaky four-year-old, the kind who'd climb the cupboards to steal a cookie while my grandma was in the bathroom. The kind who could blame the cookie theft on the dog and get away with it. The kind who knew which floorboards squeaked like wounded rats when you stepped on them. The kind who knew to turn the doorknob forty-five degrees to the left, then pull it hard so it opened smooth and quick. My grandma hadn't known I was gone for hours.

Mom had left us only about a month earlier, and it felt like two years. All Dad said was, “She had to go on a trip.” But when your mom takes a hundred percent of her clothes with her
and
removes her entire Precious Moments figurine collection from the glass curio cabinet, you can kind of figure out what the truth is. Even if you are only a little kid.

The day I ran away, the ditch by the street had filled with roaring water, and the sidewalk was nothing but a muddy bank. I watched the water carry sticks and bits of trash downhill.
This way, Xander
, the ditch river seemed to say.
Follow me and you'll find your mother.
So I starting slogging through the mud, my shoes making a
squinchsquinch
sound.

I guess I was thinking that Mom would magically drive up in her green car, her red-gold hair shining in the sunless afternoon, and take me back home. I didn't know then how long a walk it was down the mountain, and I was shivering because I hadn't remembered a jacket. (Even though I was Sherlock Holmes sneaky, I was still only four.)

I wanted Mom back for a lot of reasons, but the main one was so she could sing me my bedtime song. She was the only one who knew the words to my favorite, “All I Ask of You,” from
Phantom of the Opera
. (Hey, it's not my fault—she got me hooked on it by singing it to me when I was a baby. I haven't listened to that soundtrack in years.) My dad only sang me “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and my grandma only knew songs from the 1940s. I wanted my regular bedtime song. When you're a tiny kid, that kind of thing is as important as looking for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

I had followed the ditch river for what seemed like hours. The rain was falling so hard I could barely see. The runoff stream grew wider and wider and rose until it filled the whole road and stole away bigger things, like trash can lids and a bike tire and branches.

Finally, I reached a driveway at the bottom of a hill, my short legs feeling like overcooked noodles. The ankle-deep water stole one of my shoes. As I watched it get swept away, I got a little scared for the first time. I climbed to the mailbox and sat on a boulder next to it, feeling as soggy as a book dropped into a bathtub, and started waiting.

I'd just sit right there until Mom came by. No matter how long it took. Like the story of that dog in Japan who hung out at the train station waiting for his dead master that they made into a really sad movie I'll never watch, because I hate sad movies.

A woman with short blond hair, in T-shirt and jeans, had walked down the hillside, I guess to get the mail. She jumped about a mile into the air when she spotted me. “I thought you were a rock!” She bent to peer into my face. Her eyes were the shade of new grass, with smile lines fanning out around the edges. “Aren't you the Miyamoto boy from next door? What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for my mom,” I said.

“Your mother?” The woman bit her lip, and I knew that she knew my mother was gone. “I'm Mrs. Phasis. Why don't you come on inside, and we'll call your grandmother?” The woman held out her hand. She seemed nice enough, but she wasn't my mother, so I said no.

“No?” Mrs. Phasis looked as if she couldn't believe I'd defied her.

“No,” I repeated.

“Okay, then.” She picked me up like a sack of rice.

“Nooooo!” I screamed, and I kicked her and scratched her arms, but she didn't drop me. She just hurried into the warm house. Then she plunked me down in front of the TV and wrapped a fluffy blanket around my shoulders to stop my shivering. “Wait here, okay? Peyton, be nice to this little boy.” The lady disappeared.

“Hi.”

A boy about my size was perched on the floor, a big purple bowl in front of him. His golden hair stood up from his scalp in a crescent—sort of a natural Mohawk—and his eyes were a bright blue in the cloudy light. He cocked his head at me as he looked me up and down. Then he grinned and dipped his face into the bowl, his pointy nose and pointy chin disappearing behind the purple.

At first I didn't understand what he was doing. Then he straightened up, cheeks bulging, white kernels of popcorn sticking out of his mouth. “Want some?”

“Yes, please.” If Peyton shoved his face into a bowl like that nowadays, I'd be too grossed out to share, but we were only four back then.

He pushed the bowl toward me, and I grabbed a handful. We watched the rest of the show in easy silence. It was some program about the jungle, and I felt calmer than I had in a long time. And then my grandmother showed up to haul me back home, apologizing profusely to Mrs. Phasis.

So something good came out of that experience. That was the day I met Peyton. It was probably also the last day we were the same height.

I'm still sorry I tried to kick his mom. But how was I supposed to know she was helping me?

And, no, my mom hasn't come back. We haven't heard from her in eight years. Not a phone call or a letter or an e-mail or a carrier pigeon. I never tried to look for her again.

I glare at the clouds outside my classroom. Rain, rain, go away, I think at them. Come again some other day, when I don't have to walk home from school.

I
open my notebook stealthily, because Mr. Stedman is known for freaking out if he thinks you're not worshipping him. Especially me. Just because I once forgot to take a test because I was watching big pieces of hail hit a parked car outside and wondering if the windshield would break and how fast the ice would have to be falling for that to happen.

Do you want to know what my brain looks like? A browser with twenty-five different pages open at once. I flip back and forth between them and open even more before I'm done reading what I meant to read. And then I forget what it was I was looking for.

My teachers have tried to get Dad to medicate me. Every year since first grade, and I'm in sixth now. My report cards say stuff like
Unfocused. Daydreams. Draws on his math papers.
It makes me feel like I'm broken somehow. A computer with a virus in it. And you know what? Knowing that my teachers think I'm broken does not make me want to come to school more.

I don't think I'm broken. I just prefer to do my own thing instead of the lame things the teachers want me to do.

Dad says that's just how I am, a freaking creative genius (well, he doesn't actually use the word
freaking
, which he would call “a non-academic term”), and they all can just deal with it. “I know medication benefits many children,” Dad always tells them, “but Xander doesn't need it. It is not medically necessary. He behaves appropriately at home. The difficulties arise only in certain classes, and so he does not meet the criteria for diagnosis.”

Earlier this year, when Mr. Stedman pressed the issue, sending home note after note and making Dad come in multiple times, my father finally got angry during a conference. He stood up to his full height, and his eyes turned into polar ice caps. “You want these kids to grow up into unthinking cubicle monkeys. But that's not going to happen to Xander, I can tell you that much,” Dad had said. “You bring this up one more time, and you'll be very sorry.”

I was sort of impressed. I'd never seen Dad threaten anyone. The worst thing he ever did was write a slightly annoyed letter to the newspaper for misspelling something.
You folks really need to invest in a copy editor
, he wrote. I wondered how Dad would make Mr. Stedman sorry. Probably sit him down and lecture him
so hard
. Maybe even wag his finger at him.

For a second I wondered what my mother would have done about Mr. Stedman, if she were here. She had a real temper—Dad said it came with the red hair and the Irishness. I remember her curls flying all around her head, like a flaming halo of doom, when she got mad. Mom got angry about a lot of stuff—one of my last memories of her is Mom yelling at Dad about how he made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “You put the peanut butter on
after
the jelly, not before! Otherwise, the peanut butter sticks on the knife and gets in the jelly jar!”

It seemed like a really funny thing to get so worked up about. I asked Dad about it once, and he said she wasn't mad, just passionate. “Passionate about peanut butter and jelly?” I asked. “It's only a sandwich!”

“Passionate about everything.” Dad got a big smile on his face. “Besides, it wasn't the sandwich she was angry about.” He shook his head and looked gloomy. I changed the subject.

That makes me think that my mother would have given Mr. Stedman more than a lecture. She probably would have given him a solid right hook to the jaw.

Anyway, the threat worked. Mr. Stedman's nostrils flared as he sputtered and combed his fingers through his balding hair. Dad's glare bored holes into my teacher until Mr. Stedman finally looked away.

This whole school pretty much hates my family now. Especially Mr. Stedman.

I strategically place my thick textbook in front of my notebook and start drawing while I stare at Mr. Stedman like he's the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. If I don't draw, I will literally fall asleep, because Mr. Stedman's voice is like Ambien. And if that happened, he would truly go nuts.

I consider what to draw. Self-portrait? Too boring. Just straight black hair in a style that's almost a bowl cut, because Grandma, Obāchan, cuts it for me. (Dad keeps promising to take me to a real barber, but I'm not holding my breath.) Gray-blue eyes. Skin I can never find the right crayon color for anyway, even in Crayola's “Multicultural” collection. It's a shade with too many pink undertones to be yellow and too much yellow to be pink.

A mix. A blend. A mutt. That's me.

“Yesterday, a volcano in Hawaii froze,” Mr. Stedman says.

I pause. Huh. Now
that's
interesting. Idly, I draw sharks ice-skating on frozen lava covering the ocean. Weird climate things have been happening for the past two years. Pretty much every day, some news anchor interrupts my grandma's
Wheel of Fortune
show to tell us about snakes fleeing a rain forest, or enormous tuna jumping out of hot ocean water, or people in Florida having to buy ski jackets for a sudden blizzard.

Climate change. I guess maybe it is a problem. But it's all happening far away. Too far away for me to worry about.

On my left, Clarissa taps my arm. She grins, showing two rows of braces with hot pink rubber bands. She points to my notebook. “You should put that into the game,” she whispers.

I shrug quick, feeling my face go all hot. My hands start sweating. She tucks her long, curly black hair behind her ear and wiggles her eyebrows at me. I've known Clarissa since kindergarten. We've watched each other pick our noses. I don't know why I'm so nervous around her now. Once, I called her a hobbit—I meant it as a compliment, because hobbits are the coolest creatures ever and she's the only girl still shorter than I am—but she socked my arm so hard it left a purple bruise for two whole weeks.

The game she's talking about is what we're working on in computer class. We play this game called
CraftWorlds
, where you can build your own, well, worlds. Anything you can make with pixels. Since you actually have to know some coding to change the game, the teacher's letting us use it in class.

Not to brag, but I'm the king of the computer class. It's the one place where I pretty much rule over all the other kids. The characters I program look better, jump higher, and can do more than anyone else's. I'm famous for it around here.