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  “No!” I screamed as Gordie grabbed my arm. “Leo’s popular. He’s the one everybody worships.”

  Gordie started to drag me down the hall.

  “Think about it!” I screamed. “He’s so popular, he could make a total loser like me seem popular. He’s making a fool out of you, just like they all did.”

  I didn’t think it would work. But Gordie paused and stared at me with his lifeless eyes.

  “Really,” I said. “Look at me. I’m a jerk. A loser. Nobody would pay a moment’s attention to me without Leo making it happen. He’s way more popular than anyone in the school. Think about all he has going for him. Quarterback. Good looking. Charming. Strong. Nobody in the school is more popular.”

  “Yeah.” Gordie dropped my arm. “Leo. You’re right. He’s the one.”

  He slipped off, leaving me trembling and gasping for breath. I was drenched with sweat and shivering at the same time. But I was alive.

  Which is more than I can say for Leo. Sadly, he vanished that night. And when I say sadly, I really do mean it, because, with Leo gone, and with everyone remembering me as his best pal, and a sports hero, I’m going to have to work extra hard next year to make sure I’m not too popular when Halloween rolls around and Gordie comes back.

  Look for me if you transfer here. I’m sure we can be great friends.

  FAIRYLAND

  “It’s a fairy circle!” Edwina shrieked.

  “It is! It is!” her twin sister, Sadie, said.

  They stood at the edge of the ring of mushrooms that Edwina had spotted in a far corner of their backyard. The dew-speckled fungi glistened, as if winking at the twins with a thousand joy-filled impish eyes.

  “It can take us to fairyland!” they both said, in that unnerving simultaneous harmonized response that demonstrated why they’d never been placed in the same classroom. Or, at least, not for long.

  The twins, who were deeply steeped in fairy lore, because everyone needs to be steeped in something, knew exactly what to do. They stepped inside the circle, being careful not to damage any of the mushrooms in the slightest. They faced each other and held hands. They chanted. (Chanting, of course, being one of the few times outside of a choir performance or a pledge when voices are supposed to ring out simultaneously.)

  “Mother Mab, queen of the fairies, we beg you to allow us to visit your realm.”

  Nothing happened.

  They tried again.

  Still nothing.

  Edwina dropped Sadie’s hands. “You must have said it wrong.”

  “I said it perfectly,” Sadie said. “You must have messed it up, somehow.”

  They tossed another round of accusations at each other. And another. Their eyes narrowed. Their faces reddened. Their fists clenched. They glared at each other and hurled the nastiest, most vile, and insulting names they could think of at each other. Simultaneously, they spewed identical words that would have made their parents gasp.

  That did the trick.

  They fell through the circle and landed elsewhere.

  “It worked!” they both yelled, exchanging grins and hugs, since they never really meant those horrible nasty words. Everything was forgiven, of course.

  They were in a meadow, at the edge of a forest.

  The light was dim, as if the sun was just about to set.

  The air was warm. The breeze was gentle as it wafted past and stroked their cheeks. It carried the scent of rotting garbage and sewer gas.

  “What’s that smell?” Edwina asked. She reflexively glanced over her shoulder, down toward her rear, as if she could have unknowingly been the source of the foul stench.

  Sadie didn’t answer immediately. She was busy throwing up. Edwina’s stomach, in a display of twin empathy, decided that this was the proper response to the odor that assaulted them, and proceeded to spew its own portion of half-digested cereal onto the ground.

  “I don’t know,” Sadie finally managed to say. “Whatever it is, it’s dreadful.”

  “Oh, that’s fairy dust,” someone said, from behind them.

  The twins spun, and found themselves facing a boy who looked to be about their age, though he was taller, and had pointed ears.

  “I’m Pipsnip,” he said, throwing the twins a wave and a grin. “Welcome to Fairyland.”

  “Does it always smell like this?” Sadie asked. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

  Pipsnip sniffed the air, then frowned as if analyzing the results. “Not at all,” he said.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Edwina said.

  “This is pretty mild,” Pipsnip said. “It gets a lot worse if the breeze dies down. But you’ll get used to it.”

  “Where is everyone?” Sadie asked.

  “In Glitter Castle,” Pipsnip said. He raced off toward the trees, yelling over his shoulder, “Come on. Follow me.” His feet seemed to dance above the ground, as if he were almost flying.

  The twins, clamping their hands over their noses in a futile attempt to filter out some of the stench, followed Pipsnip through woods that seemed to be made entirely of dead or dying trees, strangled in dead or dying moss, tottering above dead or dying bushes.

  Far in the lead, Pipsnip called back to them, “Don’t touch the red ivy. It will burn your skin right off. And watch out for daffits.”

  The ivy was easy to recognize. It was red. Though not a very pleasant shade of red. The nature of daffits remained a mystery for a minute or two, until an enormous insect, the size of a pigeon, with a beak the looked like a hypodermic needle for vaccinating elephants, dived at Edwina. She swatted at it out of instinct. It burst on contact with her hand, showering her with something that might have smelled even worse than fairy dust. She didn’t throw up. But only because her stomach was already empty. Sadie prodigiously managed to spew a bit more thin gruel from the depths of her digestive system, though she barely slowed her pace as she vomited, causing Edwina to dodge and dart in an effort to avoid the spray.

  Soon, but not soon enough for the twins, they reached a clearing, where Glitter Castle sprawled before them like an enormous heap of driftwood jammed together by a giant who lacked any sense of design. As Sadie and Edwina got closer, they discovered the larger gaps between the pieces of wood had been caulked with what appeared to be animal dung. And not from a healthy, grass-grazing animal. Whatever animal had contributed its waste matter to the building efforts appeared to have a fondness for grazing on garbage or carrion.

  “This can’t get any worse,” Sadie said.

  It did.

  Though sheltered from the foul wind, the castle lacked windows, or any advanced form of plumbing. It was mostly one large room, strewn with mats where the fairies slept and low tables where they ate boiled-daffit stew. Various animals wandered through the room, including several unicorns with broken horns and matted fur. Sadie reached out to pet one, but it hissed at her and snapped its teeth.

  “That’s it,” she said, grabbing her sister’s hand. “Come on, Edwina. We’re leaving.”

  They stormed from the castle and ran back to the fairy ring. It wasn’t there. “Maybe this is the wrong place,” Sadie said.

  “It can’t be wrong.” Edwina pointed to the ground, which was generously splattered with the twins’ first reaction to Fairyland. Large worms had showed up to dine at the edges of the regurgitated cereal.

  “I guess it didn’t travel here with us,” Sadie said.

  “Then how do we get back?” Edwina asked. “There must be a way.”

  Once again, Pipsnip spoke from behind them. “Give it some thought, you brainless ninnies,” he said.

  The girls spun toward him, too startled to be offended by his words. In truth, brainless ninnies often fail to catch the meaning of unpleasant things hurled at them.

  “It’s obvious,” Pipsnip said.

  The breeze, which had blown softly ever since they’d arrived, finally died down. As the air grew still and heavy, the true stench of Fairyland hit Edwina so hard, she could barely speak. �
��What’s obvious?”

  Unable to join the chorus at the moment, since she was too busy choking on the stench to speak, Sadie shook her head and spread her hands, as if hoping to be handed the answer.

  Pipsnip stared at them with a mix of anger and sorrow. “Do you think, if there were a way out of this horrid land, anybody would stay here?” he asked.

  The twins stared back, silent.

  “We’ve been searching for an exit for centuries,” Pipsnip said. “There isn’t one.”

  Edwina’s and Sadies’s jaws dropped in dismay, but only briefly. They snapped their mouths shut as the awful taste that accompanied the true stench settled on their tongues. They quickly learned to keep those mouths shut as much as possible, which did make Fairyland a teeny tiny itsy bit more pleasant for everyone. At least, until summer ended, giving way to the slippery rains and flesh-eating tadpoles of slime season.

  And they lived miserably, in stench, filth, and squalor, ever after.

  OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

  My brother doesn’t talk much. Actually, Joey doesn’t talk at all. But he’s good with math. He carries this old calculator around with him. It’s the kind with a big screen that can do graphs. He’s always playing with it. It’s not random. He isn’t just stabbing his fingers at the buttons. I can tell that much, even though math isn’t my best subject. I’m pretty sure Joey got all the math genes in our family. Don’t ever think, just because he doesn’t talk, that he’s stupid or anything. He understands me. He’s really smart. I can tell.

  He also loves trains. He has tons of train books in his room. We go to the ridge to watch the passenger train roll by, on its way from Richford to Delta Falls. There are two trains a day. One each way. The westbound train has to slow down a lot before it reaches the trestle, because there’s a sharp curve ahead of the approach. So there’s plenty of time to see it before it picks up speed.

  During the school year, we can only catch the 7:00 PM eastbound run, after dinner. In the summer, we can go out for the 11:55 AM westbound run, too. We don’t go out every day, but it calms Joey to watch the trains, so I try to take him as often as possible. Sometimes, we’ll climb the slope all the way down to the trestle, so we can feel the trains rumble by. There’s a lot of power in all that steel. But we never go on the trestle. Everyone around here knows not to do that. It’s a single track. Go on there when a train is coming, and you’ve got two choices: jump eighty feet into a shallow river full of large rocks, or get hit by a train. I think it’s probably the same choice either way. A slow train packs as much punch as a long fall.

  We were on the ridge when the creepy guy showed up. The train had already come by, at 11:55, looking as awesome as always, but I felt like sitting there for a while, soaking up the nice weather. And Joey had his calculator, so he was happy. If I stayed right there for ten hours, he’d be good.

  I didn’t hear the guy coming. I guess I was lost in my thoughts. But I felt it when he plunked down next to me. And I heard the crunch of gravel, and the clack of small stones rolling down the slope. He was an adult. Long-sleeved shirt. It looked expensive. New jeans. Hiking boots. But not the kind for serious hiking. They were the kind you bought to make people think you hiked. It was hard to tell how tall he was, seated there, but he seemed pretty solid.

  I looked at him, figuring he’d say something. But he just stared back. His eyes gave me the shivers. It was creepy enough he sat right down next to us. The silence made it even worse. I glanced over at Joey, who was punching buttons and paying no attention to the man.

  “Let’s go.” I got up. So did Joey. He was used to doing what I asked, as long as it was what he wanted to do.

  The guy stood, too. “Sorry,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  He reached toward his belt right behind his hip and pulled out a hunting knife. Sunlight flashed off the blade. It looked like it had just been cleaned and polished.

  “Sorry it’s you. It has to be someone. I’ve been waiting. Watching. Looking. You come a lot. Patterns make it easy.”

  This can’t be real, I thought. But it was. I was in the woods near the train tracks, facing a killer with a knife. My only chance was to run. Trying to escape uphill would be a mistake. It was a steep climb. I was good at scrabbling, but Joey was slow. We had to run on the tracks.

  Which way?

  The tracks away from the trestle cut through an even steeper valley, with no easy path back up for at least three miles. We’d be trapped. We had to run across the trestle. It was about a half mile, but that would get us to the road. And to houses. We’d scream. People would come help us.

  It would be safe to go on the trestle. The train had already crossed. There wouldn’t be another one until evening. And Joey would follow me. We just had to stay ahead of the guy for a short stretch.

  “Who’s first?” the guy asked. He pointed the knife back and forth between Joey and me, as if playing a choosing game.

  “You!” I shouted. I gave him a hard shove. He didn’t fall. But he staggered back.

  “Run!” I screamed at Joey. I grabbed his arm and yanked him toward the tracks. He ran. I ran. The guy ran.

  The guy was big and angry. We were small and scared. But we were faster. And we had on sneakers that were meant for running. We’d put five or ten yards between us and him by the time we got to the middle of the trestle. I could hear him panting. We were going to make it.

  “Keep running,” I told Joey, risking a lungful of air I hoped I wouldn’t need later.

  We were three quarters of the way across the trestle when I heard the whistle.

  No mistake. I knew what it was.

  Freight train!

  They almost never come along. Maybe once a month. But one was coming now. I could see smoke in the distance, moving in a curving path above the hills as the train followed the tracks.

  I froze for an instant. Then I looked over my shoulder. The guy froze, too. But not for long. He turned and ran back the way we’d come. I guess he needed to live more than he needed to kill. At least, at this moment.

  That didn’t make things any better for us. Following the guy meant death, delayed. I knew he’d be there, waiting, and kill us as soon as we got off the tracks. I looked down, and felt my stomach squeeze into a tight ball of fear. Death lay that way, too. Not just for me. For Joey. He was older, but it was my job to protect him. I’d always done that. I protected him from cars when we crossed the street, and from bullies when we were in town.

  We had to follow the killer. There was no other choice. A tiny chance to survive was better than no chance at all. Maybe I could tackle him really hard and send us both over the edge. At least that would save my brother.

  I turned back that way. “Come on, Joey.”

  “No!”

  If I wasn’t already frozen, I would have been nailed in place by that shout. My whole life, I’d never heard Joey say a single word.

  “We gotta run, Joey,” I said. “We have to get off the tracks.” Maybe he was more scared of the guy with the knife than he was of the train. I guess that made sense. He loved trains. He probably couldn’t imagine that something he loved could hurt him.

  Joey waved the calculator in my face. I waited for him to say more, but instead, he ran toward the train.

  “Come back,” I shouted.

  He did. But only to grab me and start dragging me with one hand while waving the calculator with the other. If I fought back against him, we’d die right there.

  I stopped struggling and followed him, running toward the train that would flatten us beneath tons of steel, or knock us into the gorge. Even if the engineer saw us, there was no way he’d be able to stop in time. I could see the front of the train, now, as it cleared the curve and entered the approach to the trestle. I could hear the engine strain as it started to pick up speed.

  We ran. I looked back. The guy was heading toward safety. He looked back, too. I guess he wanted to see us die, even if he couldn’t kill us himself.


  I followed Joey, running toward the train that was barreling toward us.

  It turned out to be a brilliant idea. We reached the end of the trestle, and dived off the tracks onto solid ground, just seconds before the train shot past.

  As we lay there, sprawled on the ground, Joey tapped the calculator again. There was nothing on the display. But that’s when I understood what he was trying to say.

  Trust me. I know math. I know trains.

  I thought about those algebra problems where a train is going somewhere and you have to figure out when it will arrive. That’s what this was. And the answer was tricky. We were closer to the side of the trestle where the train was coming. Joey had figured out, somehow, that we needed to run that way to get off in time. I moved up the ridge a bit and I looked toward the other end, just in time to see what would have happened to us if we’d run away from the train.

  It didn’t feel good watching the killer get killed by the train. It didn’t feel good at all. But it felt right.

  “You saved us, Joey,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. He never said another word, the rest of our lives. But I know he understood me. And I understood him a little better, too. That’s how it is with brothers who look after each other. I might not be great with math, but I know that sometimes one plus one is a whole lot more than two.

  THE SWORD IN THE STEW

  And there appeared in the land of Caerleon an enormous pot of stew, half the height of a full-grown knight, filled to the bubbling brim with an assortment of savory meats and flavorful vegetables. As if the sudden appearance of a meal fit for a king wasn’t wondrous enough, a gleaming sword protruded from the center of the stew, its hilt studded with sapphires and rubies, its point buried deep in the bubbling broth. And, as if even a sword fit for a king thrust into a meal fit for a king wasn’t wondrous enough, a gleaming message meant for an aspiring king was carved deep into the surface of the pot, encircling it right beneath the rim:

  He who removes the sword from the stew shall be the rightful king of Caerleon.