Ignatius MacFarland (8 page)

HAMLET

You know . . . the play by William Shakespeare? The play we had seen the high schoolers perform and that was the reason why I brought my dad’s really expensive old book to class? The book that was the reason I ran back inside the rocket right before it exploded and brought me to this weird place? All these strange new creatures I never knew existed before were going to see this really good but hard to understand play about a prince in Denmark who finds out that his father was murdered and then tries to avenge his death.

Pretty weird, right? Well . . .

Was this what I was so surprised about when I saw that marquee? Would you believe me if I told you it wasn’t?

Well, you’d better because the thing that surprised me the most was that written under the word “Hamlet” it read:

A new play written by our president and leader, His Most Royal Excellency, Chester L. Arthur

And next to this was a picture of Chester L. Arthur, who was none other than . . .

Mr. Arthur, the English teacher from my school who was killed five years ago when his house blew up!

I was so shocked to see it that I forgot where I was and started to walk toward the sign, trying to figure out just what the heck was going on.

And that was when somebody tackled me.

13

KAREN . . . FINALLY

Actually, the word “tackled” is probably too polite.

• Knocked me down and almost killed me.

• Hit me so hard that I thought my head was going to come off.

• Creamed me into the ground and smashed me as flat as a pancake.

However you want to phrase it, I was practically knocked unconscious. And it scared the you-know-what out of me. For all I knew, I was about to be eaten by some weird tiger-like creature that had fins instead of paws or a giant walking oyster with a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. As I closed my eyes and prepared to find out what it feels like to be eaten alive, I heard a voice whisper angrily in my face, “What are you trying to do? Get yourself
killed ?!
”

It wasn’t some weird creature’s voice and it wasn’t one of my friends’ voices, since I thought that maybe I was having one of those moments like you always see in movies where someone thinks something bad is happening to them but then it turns out that they were asleep and the voice of whoever was about to hurt them turns into the voice of one of their friends trying to wake them up. No, this wasn’t either of those things.

This was a girl’s voice.

I opened my eyes to see Karen. Only, I didn’t know she was Karen at that moment. I didn’t know she was Karen because I didn’t
know
Karen at that moment. When I opened my eyes and saw her, all I knew was that a sixteen-year-old girl who had long black hair and kind of a pretty face was sitting on top of me with her nose about half an inch from mine and that she was really mad.

“What do you think you’re doing, walking around and letting everybody see you?” she hissed in my face like Gary’s cat used to do whenever I would try to touch its paws. “Are you really that
stupid,
kid?”

And with that, she looked back toward the theater where Mr. Arthur’s
Hamlet
was playing, then grabbed me by the front of my shirt and dragged me off into the alley. She was pulling me so fast and so hard that I couldn’t stand up.

“You’re ripping my pants!” I said as she dragged me along the rock-covered ground. Sort of weird to think that those were the first words I ever said to Karen. But, well, she
was
ripping my pants.

“Shut up!” she whispered loudly.

Before I could say another word, she stopped, pulled open a small door at the end of the alley that was hidden behind a pile of garbage, and shoved me inside it headfirst. To do this, she grabbed my belt buckle and used it like a handle, so that as she pushed me into the doorway she gave me such a monstrous wedgie that I was sure I would be talking in a soprano voice for the rest of my life.

“OW—!” I said as she clapped her hand over my mouth and pushed me the rest of the way in. Then she scrambled in after me and pulled the door shut with a
slam!

Before I could figure out where I was, she sat on top of my chest again and stuck her face in my face, like she was a police interrogator. “How did you get here?”

“You just pushed me in!” I knew exactly what she meant but since she was being so mean to me, I sort of felt like not being the most cooperative person in the world. I’m not a fan of mean people.

“How did you get to
this world,
you stupid kid?” I could tell that she knew I knew what she was talking about and it only seemed to make her madder that she had to ask me again. As far as first meetings go, ours was not going well.

“Why are you being such a jerk?” I asked.

“Why are
you
being such a baby?” she asked back.

“Get off me! You’re crushing my ribs.”

“Man, you’re a wuss.”

“Hey, shut up. I don’t even know you.”

“Thank God.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that the only reason I bothered to save you was that if they caught you they’d probably use you to get to me!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, since I was pretty confused at that point. “Who wants to catch me?”

“Yeah, like you don’t know.”

“I don’t! I have no idea where I am or what’s going on or why everything I’ve been seeing for the past four hours is completely different from anything I’ve ever seen in my life! So stop yelling at me and get your butt off my chest!”

She gave me a weird look like I had said something that surprised her, then sat up so that she wasn’t in my face anymore, even though she was still sitting on me and crushing my rib cage.

“Four hours?” she said, shocked. “Do you mean you
just
got here?”

“Yes!” It’s pretty embarrassing to admit but when I said this I was sort of about two seconds away from crying. Not that I’m the kind of kid who starts crying if anything bad happens. I’d had plenty of bad stuff happen to me over the years but very seldom did I cry about it. I mean, I wasn’t like Paul Fresco, the big tall kid who was a grade higher than me who was famous for crying whenever anything happened to him. He even started crying once just because somebody asked him why he always cried.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

“I told you, I don’t know. My friends and I made a rocket but the engine exploded when I went inside it and when I got out of it, everything was gone and I was wherever this place is.”

I was trying really hard to hold it together but my stupid nose was starting to run and so I had to do a big sniffle the second I finished what I said. Fortunately, she seemed to be thinking about something else and wasn’t really paying attention to me or my nose at that moment.

“Then it’s true,” was all she said, way more to herself than to me.

“What’s true?” I asked with another big embarrassing sniffle.

“That’s the same way I got here,” she said, looking at me like I was supposed to be all amazed.

“You built a rocket and it blew up?”

“No, dummy, I got here because of an explosion, too.”

“You did?” I asked, pretending to scratch my nose while actually intercepting a drip that was about to come out. “What kind of explosion?”

“I was mixing a bunch of chemicals that I wasn’t supposed to be mixing in my chemistry class and the whole thing exploded and when I woke up, I was lying on top of a hill next to this city.”

I was pretty surprised when she told me this, I have to admit, because it made me remember something. A year ago, there was this big story in our local paper about this weird girl from the high school who had blown herself up in science class. I didn’t know who she was, but the kids in my grade with older brothers and sisters said she was this really strange girl who was pretty smart but who never talked to anybody and who always dressed like she thought she was living in a vampire movie. A lot of people thought that she blew herself up on purpose because she only listened to really depressing music about death and dying. It always sounded a lot to me like the way Mr. Arthur had died. Or appeared to have died, since both his and Karen’s bodies were never found at the explosion sites.

“I read about you in the newspaper. Everybody thinks you blew yourself up on purpose,” I said, wondering if she was going to get mad.

She did.

“God, that’s so stupid! Figures all those mindless drones in that toilet of a town would think I would kill myself just because I wasn’t one of them. Yes, that’s me. The poor little suicidal freak.” She glared at me like I was the one who had started the rumor about her. Although I guess I
was
sort of guilty because when I had read about her, I just assumed that the story was true. Still . . .

“Hey, don’t get mad at me. I wasn’t the one who said you did it. I don’t even know you,” I said defensively. “If it makes you feel any better, everybody thinks that Mr. Arthur killed himself, too.”

“He did kill himself,” she said, giving me a look that showed she thought I was a moron. “Or he thought he did. Too bad he didn’t.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, a bit put off that she had just wished Mr. Arthur dead. “What’s going on? How did we all get here?”

“Don’t you get it?” she said with another you’re-an-idiot look. “We jumped
frequencies.
”

I was completely confused.

“Don’t stare at me like you just smelled dog poop,” she said. “Look. Each one of us was caught in an explosion. Each one of us ended up here. Our explosions knocked us into a parallel reality.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means we’re existing in the same space on the same planet as the one we knew back home, but we’re in a different frequency of it. Like when you press the button on a car stereo to change the station. The music is coming out of the same radio in the same car, but it’s completely different because it’s at a different frequency.”

I looked at her like I thought she was crazy but quickly realized that what she was saying sort of made sense. But it didn’t make it any easier to understand.

“How do you know this?” I asked, trying to use a nice tone of voice so that she wouldn’t yell at me again.

“I just know it, okay? Think about it. When you got out of your rocket, were you in the same place you were before the explosion? Were you surrounded by the same mountains and hills and stuff ?”

She was right. The dead field was still the dead field after the explosion and the mouse ears were still where they had been back home. Only the barn was gone. Although . . .

“Wait a minute. All the trees and plants and grass were different. So it wasn’t really the same place,” I said, feeling smart.

“No duh, genius,” she said sarcastically (as if you couldn’t tell). “That’s all the
living
stuff. The plants and everything evolved differently here than it did back where we’re from. But the hills and the mountains and the whole planet are the same. Like after I woke up from the explosion, I was on top of a hill. And it was the same hill that the high school is built on top of. It’s just that the school doesn’t exist in this reality. Thank God.”

I tried to take this all in but was feeling a bit overwhelmed. “What do you mean, that the living things evolved differently?”

“What grade are you in?” she asked with the same I-just-smelled-dog-poop look she had yelled at me for having on my face moments earlier.

“Seventh,” I said defensively.

“Don’t they teach you about evolution in science class?” Then she gave me a weird look. “You don’t go to some crazy private school, do you?”

“No, I go to the same junior high you went to. And I
know
about evolution.” I was suddenly kicking myself for all the alien drawings I had made while Mr. Andriasco was giving his lectures about evolution, as well as hoping that she wouldn’t ask me to explain it.

“Yeah?” she said as she arched her eyebrow at me. “Then what is it?”

Great.

“It’s . . . uh . . . it’s . . . um . . . uh . . .” Man, I should have paid more attention in class.

“You’re the reason that schools are losing funding, kid,” she said with a smirk. “Evolution means that everything develops from a really basic form. And since this is a different world, everything in it developed and evolved differently than in our world.”

“How’s that possible?”

“The only reason things look the way they do in our world is because of billions of tiny mutations that happen over millions of years. It’s all random and can come out differently every time. Some single cell creatures develop into multiple cell creatures. Then while they’re all multiplying and having kids, one or two of their kids have a different gene in their DNA that makes them stronger or more able to survive than the others. So those plants and creatures live while the other ones die and the stronger ones multiply again.

“Eventually, they or their kids or their kids’ kids have some kids who have a mutated gene that makes
them
stronger and more able to survive. So those become the new creatures and on and on for millions of years until suddenly everything looks either the way it does here or in that stupid town we used to live in.”