By the Grace of Todd Read online

  “Do you mean Dick?”

  “The very one! He should visit Supercuts and have something done for that. Fast, simple, and stylish. No appointment needed.”

  “Who else has Max sold?”

  “Spud bought Persephone. She and Herman were both enslaved for only ten dollars each. Now, I ask you, are we not worth far more than that? On QVC, the shipping alone on the hottest pair of this season’s suede pumps with bows on the toes is only $9.97! I am not sure what shipping means, but are we not worth more than ten dollars to you, Great One? Will you not do something to right these wrongs, or must we appeal to Judge Judy?”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best—”

  Lewis began talking even faster, his voice nearly screeching with urgency. “If you do not protect us, we will probably perish by fire. Did I mention Max is making us jump through flaming hoops? It’s true! I no longer have any eyebrows! They were singed off last night when I was forced to pass through the Circle of Fiery Doom!”

  “Fiery Dooooooom!” chorused the Toddlians.

  Lewis sounded like he was starting to lose it. “How will I ever get a Bachelorette to marry me if I have no eyebrows? I mean no disrespect, Great One. But please intervene!”

  “Lewis, I’ll try, but—” The warning bell sounded, temporarily saving me from having to come up with an explanation. “For now you guys have got to go back in the backpack.”

  Lewis nodded sagely, and I carefully set the sock on top of the books in the backpack and zipped it shut, trying to ignore the Toddlians’ cries for help.

  This was worse than I thought. Poor little Toddlians. And Lewis seemed like a real stand-up guy. Or stand-up humant, or whatever. He didn’t deserve this.

  But what was I supposed to say to Max? “Hey, I want my bug people back, because . . .” If I made it sound like he was doing something wrong, he’d dump me back at the dorks’ table and I’d be tortured . . . just like the Toddlians.

  Argh! I had to say something to him, but what?

  Max came running through the cafeteria doors before I could make up my mind. He swaggered over to me and threw his sweaty arm across my shoulders. “You should’ve come with us,” he declared. “We knocked a whole nest full of baby squirrels on the ground and then we—”

  It was now or never. “Max, I . . . I . . .”

  My vision wandered as I tried to find the words. Eventually my gaze landed on Spud—who was currently kicking a parking meter—and Dick, who was standing there, laughing.

  “I know,” he said, nodding at his friends. “Those guys are losers sometimes, but I gotta hang with them ’cause we go way back.” He threw his backpack over his shoulder, making my stomach lurch, and gave my arm a stinky squeeze. “I’d rather hang with you. Anyways, let’s get to gym and shoot some hoops, lil’ homey!” He laughed at himself, and I chuckled too.

  What was I worried about, anyway? If the Toddlians could live off the gunk on my sweaty sock, they had to be pretty tough.

  Max hadn’t killed any of them yet—he couldn’t hurt them and still earn an A.

  Would a couple of days really make that much difference?

  CHAPTER 11

  HERMAN

  “S-s-s-oooo c-cold,” I whispered through clacking teeth, if only to convince myself I had not yet frozen to death. I tried to wrap up in the enormous pages of the open book I sat upon, but to no avail. The musty, yellowed papers were too thin to keep out the cold, and they rattled mockingly as I shivered.

  I nestled down farther into the cracks between the giant pages of Volume I of Encyclopedia Britannica, the name inscribed on the mountain of books stacked beneath me. Several volumes lay open on the grimy floor, and I’d spent my time as a captive in this gray, cavernous room exploring their contents. When at last I feared contracting what Volume H called “hypothermia,” I decided to scale Mount Britannica to try to keep warm.

  Alas, neither the climb nor the paper could warm me. I would perish betwixt the pages, alone and unsung. Goodbye, Herman. You must be brave.

  At first I had thought starvation to be my fiercest enemy. All I had eaten in three days was dander from Dick’s unappetizing dirty laundry. But his maternal person had since fed the garments into the mouth of a giant white machine that hummed and swooshed as it chewed and digested. My own belly gnawed and rumbled, and I ripped off a corner of a page and munched the musty morsel. Ack! My mouth was too dry to swallow it down, and I spat the wad over the mountain’s edge.

  I yawned and curled up on top of a colorful diagram labeled INTESTINAL TRACT. The diagram was slick and cool, which would serve to keep me awake a while longer. Drowsiness was a sure sign of hypothermia.

  I rattled off data from the other volumes to stimulate my mind—whether the macaroni penguin had become extinct, what had really sunk the Titanic—and recited Housman, Alfred Edward’s poetry to myself, followed by Hardy, Thomas’s prose.

  “Just go to sleeeep,” a voice droned inside me. “Stop thinking and close your little eye-peeps.” My eyes slid shut, and I imagined my maternal person singing a Toddlandian lullaby:

  Toddlandia, Toddlandia, our home upon a sock.

  Toddlandia, Toddlandia, of forest, hill, and rock,

  From the salty Sweat River to the wide Sebaceous Sea,

  Toddlandia, Toddlandia, our love we pledge to thee.

  Thinking about my maternal person jolted me awake. She would be horribly grieved if I never returned. I must get warm for her sake.

  I stood and rubbed my eyes, then walked to the edge of the page for a better view of my surroundings. Surely there must be a warmer place somewhere within these cluttered walls. On my left hung all manner of instruments that appeared to be tools of some kind. Beneath the wall of tools was a shelf with a large, circular blade that had ferocious jagged teeth. The moonlight glinted off the silvery metal, and I shivered.

  On the wall to my right hung—what was that? A gigantic red monster crouched on the ground, staring at me with slanted, prismatic eyes. How had I not noticed it before?

  The monster was shiny and flaming red, like the poison dart frogs I had read about in Volume F. But unlike the frogs, which possessed a loud call, this monster sat motionless and silent. No doubt it waited for me to get close enough to crunch.

  Just then, a great light filled the room as Dick’s paternal person entered through the door and walked to the monster. He opened its side and climbed into it, causing the fiend to roar and emit a foul, smoky gas cloud out its anal opening. Then a hatch crept up behind the beast, and it rolled backward out of the room. The hatch closed.

  I staggered back to the middle of the page, trying to make sense of what I had witnessed. Whatever the red creature was, Dick’s paternal person was not afraid of it; in fact, he seemed to have tamed and mastered it. The smoke indicated an internal fire of some kind . . . Wait! I had read about internal combustion on the very page where I stood.

  Yes! There it was beneath me! The light remained on, giving me a better view of the diagram beneath the words INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE. I quickly scoured the information relating to the engine and soon realized that the fearsome beast that had so frightened me was nothing more than a machine known as an auto-mobile—commonly called a “car.”

  I chuckled in my relief. Silly Herman, you have much to learn! But this one thing I did know: if I could find a way inside the car when it returned, I would be warm!

  CHAPTER 12

  I didn’t get a chance to talk to Max about taking it easy on the Toddlians during gym, but I did get picked third when we teamed up for basketball, which was the second-coolest thing to ever happen to me.

  The first-coolest was being friends with Max.

  You hear about the benefits of being popular, but to actually experience them firsthand is something else. For instance, when I slammed into Frankie Chest-Hair-at-Eleven Ludevick going for a late-game layup, he apolo
gized to me, not the other way around.

  I could get used to that.

  The only thing that wasn’t cool about gym class was when Max and some of the bigger sixth graders stole Ike’s SpongeBob Underoos and tossed them in the shower with him. I don’t know what he did for underwear for the rest of the day—I tried to remember if Duddy had an extra pair stashed away that he could lend to him—but Ike took it in stride and laughed right along with everyone else. He had a good attitude, that kid.

  Speaking of Duddy’s dork posse, an hour later I found myself walking about a block behind them on my route home. From the way they were kicking and slashing with their arms, it was obvious they were deep into Dragon Sensei.

  I felt myself speeding up to go talk to them—I did promise Duddy that we could hang out after school—when somebody slammed me hard on the back, and I almost fell over. I whirled around to find my face in Max’s armpit. “Hey, Little Butty, where you running off to? Dude, we need to work on our science project.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said to the pit. “We can go to your house. Where do you live?”

  “Naw, that won’t work. My brother has this weekly thing with his parole officer, so we better go to your place. Besides, I got our ticket to an A right here.” Max pulled my sock out of his pocket, and I could hear the Toddlians cheering. They’d probably have to rebuild their entire village after being crunched up like that.

  Mom was thrilled to see Max when we came in. “How nice that you’re already making so many new friends, Todd.” She had Daisy in the sink and was washing gooey eggs, shells and all, out of her hair. Camo was sitting on the counter, nibbling on a pile of Cheerios with such gusto, I guessed he must have been pretty tired of worms. “I’ll keep Daisy busy and away from your room while you boys play.” Once I’d pried VanderPuff off Max’s leg, we headed down the hall.

  I spread the sock flat on my desk and put on the micro-glasses so I could survey the damage without straining my eyes. The village was a wreck. But instead of repairing their huts, the Toddlians were doing . . . “Circus tricks?”

  “Yeah! Isn’t that sweet?” Max whipped a DVD out of his backpack and handed it to me. It had a crazy-looking clown on the front cover and a bunch of muscled-up people doing contortions on the back. I couldn’t read the title since it was in a foreign language. “What’s this say?”

  “Cirque du Soleil. It’s my mom’s DVD. They do some amazing stunts. I put this on for the buggies to soak up all night after I went to bed.”

  “Uh, don’t they need to sleep, too?”

  “Dude, they can sleep after we get our A. Check ’em out!”

  I plopped in my chair, and Max told the Toddlians to “hit it.”

  And did they ever! A bunch of them burst out of one of the few still-standing huts while one of the boys sang some bizarre, high-pitched opera song. They had fluffed up and dyed their hair every color of the rainbow. Their togas were crazy colors, too. Three of them made a triple Toddlian tower while two others stretched out a cut rubber band as far as it would go. A little she-Toddlian started at one end of the rubber band, ran the length of it, and then, whoosh! catapulted herself to the top of the tower. I clapped so hard I shook the tower apart, and they tumbled down. “Sorry,” I said to them, “but that was incredible!”

  The Toddlians picked themselves up and bowed to me. “¡Gracias, El Magnifico!”

  I turned to Max. “I think they’re speaking Spanish.”

  He shrugged. “Univision probably came on after the DVD kicked off. Pretty cool stuff, huh? Dude, watch the pretzel.”

  On cue, a girl Toddlian in some kind of yellow bodysuit thingy cartwheeled to center-sock and twisted her body in unthinkable ways. She jumped around like a four-legged spider—her arms were where her legs were supposed to be and her legs were where her arms were meant to go. Her tiny face was twisted into a grimace. She was definitely not having fun.

  “Okay, I’ve seen enough of that,” I said before she could break her back. “Impressive flexibility.”

  She untangled herself, bowed, and said, “El gusto es mio, Señor Todd.”

  “Uh, no comprendo.” I hadn’t paid much attention in Spanish class.

  “My pleasure, Great Todd.” She skittered back into the hut, and two male Toddlians in leopard-print shorts wheeled out a contraption that looked like a rusty hamster wheel.

  “You’ll love this one,” Max said. “They call it ‘Spinning Death.’”

  The Toddlians bowed and climbed inside the wheel. Max flicked it, and the wheel made a teeth-grinding squeak as it spun. The Toddlians leaped from bar to bar, trying to keep up as Max spun the wheel faster and faster. When he tossed one of them a piece of thread, the Toddlian climbed to the outside of the wheel and hopped along the top, trying to jump rope. I couldn’t watch.

  “Auughhh!” the rope jumper screamed as he fell to the desk. His friend bailed out of the wheel and helped him up. “Lo siento,” the injured one said to me as he hobbled to the hut. “Estoy muy cansado.”

  “What’s he saying?” I asked Max.

  “Like I know. Probably says he’ll get it right next time, wants to try it again.”

  “He says he is exhausted,” said a familiar tiny voice. Lewis came out of the hut wearing something that looked exactly like a torn bit of blue balloon. His hair had been dyed purple, the same shade as his freckles. He bounced over to me. “We are all exhausted, Great Todd. Max has been driving us nonstop, and we need rest.”

  “Oh, good!” said Max when he spotted Lewis. “Lardo the Flaming Bug Boy is ready for his act!”

  “Please, do not make me try it again!” Lewis/Lardo begged. “I am so tired.” He raised his arms to me and cried, “Great Todd, take me away!”

  Max seemed not to hear. He dipped a pink bubble wand into a container of what smelled like the stuff we used to clean our brushes in art class.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Turpentine,” he said, spilling some on my desk. “This is the grand finale. Feast your eyes!”

  Lewis trudged to the opposite side of the sock, where he stepped onto a piece of Popsicle stick on four Matchbox car wheels. He kicked up speed then jumped off a ramp. At that point he was supposed to sail through the hoop part of the bubble wand, but instead he crashed right into it, knocking it over.

  “Fail!” Max said. “Maybe if I light it on fire, you’ll—” As I felt my eyebrows shooting up, Max suddenly stopped himself and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. When he opened his eyes and spoke, his voice was softer. “I mean,” he said, looking down at Lewis, “I’d encourage you to try that again, buddy.” Lewis looked confused as Max turned to me and whispered, “We gotta keep an eye on their self-esteem. Keeps ’em motivated. I’ve been reading my dad’s management books.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just glanced down at my favorite Toddlian. Lewis looked at me with huge eyes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t really have to.

  “Do you really think he’s ready for this?” I asked, my heart beating fast. “Why don’t we let him rest for a minute?”

  Max snorted. “The fair is this weekend, dude. Bug Boy can rest when we’ve won those free ride wristbands.” Max whipped out a lighter and set the hoop ablaze.

  Lewis picked up the skateboard and forced himself back to the other side of the sock. He sighed and pedaled toward the ramp. This time he actually made it into the hoop. The balloon suit overheated on the way through and exploded, which shot Lewis too high. His purple hair turned to an orange flame.

  “Stop, drop, and roll!” I yelled, searching for something wet. I finally grabbed a long-forgotten can of Dr Pepper off my desk and poured some on him, and the fire went out. “Lewis, are you okay?”

  He was flat on his back in nothing but his skivvies, but he managed to lift up his singed head. “I soon will be, thanks to you, Great Todd.” His head flopped back
onto the sock; then he raised it again, licking his lips. “What is that deliciously sweet liquid?”

  “Dr Pepper,” I told him. “Careful, it’s kind of addictive.” I put out my pinkie, and he clung to it and sat up.

  Max gave the Toddlians a five-minute break, and as soon as he was out of earshot, they started asking for help. “Won’t you save us, Great Todd?” the tiny singing boy begged. “I’m so sleepy! I can’t . . . go on.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I promised, kicking myself for agreeing to let Max hold on to the Toddlians. They looked all bedraggled and sad, their togas dirty or scorched, teeny little bags under their eyes. “But you all have to be patient. I need time to work on a plan.”

  Lewis licked his lips. “May I have some more of that delicious nectar while we wait?”

  The second the five minutes was up, Max made them get back to practicing. He did give Lewis a safer act once he’d dried off, letting him juggle marbles. But Lewis wasn’t any better at that than he’d been at the skateboard stunt and once completely passed out by beaning himself on the head with a cat’s-eye. I dribbled some more DP on him and he revived. “Back to the Circle of Fiery Doom,” Max proclaimed.

  “I think he was actually better at that.”

  At one point, Max burned his finger lighting the flaming wand and went to the bathroom to run cold water on it. While he was gone, Lewis said, “How is your plan progressing, Great Todd? I do not mean to question your infinite wisdom, but even Max must agree that this is more than we can endure.”

  I felt my heart beat faster again. I knew Lewis was right, but there was nothing I could do about it. Not right then, anyway. Couldn’t they see that?

  “It’s going to take a little longer, Lewis,” I said. “And I can’t promise anything. I mean . . . I’ll do my best.”