Escape from the Overworld Page 3

  So she led me around her house. Besides Maison’s bedroom, there was a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom for her mom. It was not as nice as any of the places Dad made, but it had the same sort of rooms. She also said that even though her mom designed houses for work, she hadn’t designed her own home. Her mom had bought this house with that green non-emerald stuff that she’d gotten through a factory because she drew buildings on paper. Or at least I think that’s what Maison was telling me.

  She didn’t live on a farm, but she did have some space behind her house that she said was a “backyard.” It wasn’t very big. Maison said the grass out front was called the “front yard.” That made sense, but not much else did.

  “So you don’t have sheep or anything?” I said. “How do you get your wool?” And then I thought. “Wait, from the stores, right? You really do get mostly everything from the stores, huh?”

  “Yes, we do,” she said, and looked tired of explaining about the stores again.

  Back up in her room, she said, “My mom should be home soon, so I’ll go ahead and make you a bed for tonight. I’ll be right back.”

  I sat on the edge of her bed, thinking. Wait, hadn’t Maison said earlier that people didn’t actually make stuff in this world? I didn’t want her to have to give her green non-emerald things to a store to get me a bed; I didn’t want to be a bother to her like that.

  I decided I would make my own bed and save her the trouble. Normally I made a bed out of three planks of wood and some wool, but there were no planks of wood in the house and I didn’t know where the store was that sold wool. There were some trees in her backyard, but I couldn’t knock them down without asking permission.

  There had been a fireplace in the living room, and it had chunks of wood piled next to it. I would have to make do. I got together the firewood, put the pieces on Maison’s desk (the closest thing I could see to a crafting table), and got to work.

  Maison came back to her bedroom a few minutes later, calling out, “I have blankets!” But then she stopped in the doorway, her eyes going wide. I had just finished up my firewood-made bed.

  “Ah, thanks!” I said, taking the blankets she had in her arms. They were so soft! “This will make the bed comfortable.”

  “I was just going to lie a bunch of blankets on the floor for a bed,” she said, kneeling down to check out what I’d made. “This is pretty good, especially since you made it so fast.”

  Maison ran one of her “fingers” along the edge of my bed. “I would love to build things all the time. You have no idea how lucky you are.”

  That got me to stop right in the middle of fluffing up blankets. Me, the klutz builder, lucky?

  “Here, I want to show you something.” She reached into her closet and pulled out a miniature house, all made out of oak wood. I sucked in a breath when I saw it. It looked eerily similar to the tree house I had in mind and had been trying to make. There were definitely different details, like how this was a stand-alone house and not something in a tree, but it was alike enough to make me not want to take my eyes off of it.

  “Do you have creatures who can live in there?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a model house. I want to show it to my shop class teacher. I worked on it all summer. See?”

  She set it down on her desk and lifted the roof off it. Inside I could see tiny furniture.

  “I whittled all that furniture from firewood,” she said. “This took me months! The one thing I looked forward to with middle school was shop class. But the shop class teacher is so scared we’ll get hurt that she never lets us make anything interesting. She always says,” Maison puckered up her face and made her voice snooty, “‘The shop class room is not a joke! You can get seriously hurt in here. No running. No grabbing. No looking away from what you’re doing.’”

  “So you can’t get hurt in shop class?” I said.

  “Well, no, you can,” she said. “You need to be careful in shop class, but she’s over the top. I want to show her what I can really make. I think a lot of the other kids take shop class to goof around, but I’m serious about this.” She put the roof back on her little house.

  “You’re a builder. What do you think?” she asked.

  I thought it was better than anything I could make, but I was too embarrassed to say so. “I think your shop class teacher will love it,” I said.

  I remained up in Maison’s room when her mom got home. While I studied the little house, I listened to Maison and her mom’s voices downstairs. I couldn’t make out the words, but their conversation sounded pleasant, not at all like my recent talk with Dad.

  Sunset came, and for the first time in my life I didn’t have thoughts about zombies. I got to sleep in my little firewood bed, a few feet from Maison’s bed. Even if zombies couldn’t actually get inside a house Dad made, it always turned my stomach to hear them in the distance at night.

  But here all I heard was the wind and noises that Maison said came from cars passing by. “And, no,” Maison said after I asked, “you do not use carrots on sticks to make cars go.”

  “Maison,” I whispered now, staring out the window.

  “What?” she asked sleepily from her bed.

  “Your moon is round!” I exclaimed, staring at it.

  “Goodnight, Stevie,” Maison said, and turned over.

  CHAPTER 10

  IN THE MORNING MAISON HAD BREAKFAST WITH HER mom. I could hear talking and minutes later Maison returned to her bedroom with my breakfast. She said it was called “cereal” and I needed to eat it with a spoon.

  “This is good!” I said, spooning more into my mouth. “How do you make it?”

  “The milk comes from a cow, and the cereal comes from grains,” she said. She couldn’t tell me anything beyond that, which was weird, because I knew exactly where all my food came from. While I slurped down my breakfast, she went over to the computer portal and pressed the button. Within a minute, my world was back on her computer again. No sign of the spider.

  That probably means I should go back home, I thought, biting at my spoon. I no longer had the excuse of needing to stay here to keep me safe from the mob.

  But I really didn’t want to go back, not till I saw the school and learned a little more about this world.

  “I still have a hard time believing all this.” Maison shook her head as she stared through the computer portal. “Playing video games will never be the same again.”

  She put a bag over her shoulders and said it was called a “backpack,” but told me to leave my tool pouch here, because some of the stuff I had in there wouldn’t be “appropriate” to take to school. I had to trust her on that one.

  “My mom hasn’t left for work yet so we have to be quiet,” Maison said, whispering. We made our way down the stairs as quietly as possible and were halfway through the living room when I heard a woman’s voice call from the kitchen, “Maison, are you heading out already?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Maison said hurriedly.

  “I don’t get a goodbye first?” Maison’s mom said. We heard her footsteps heading our way.

  Before I could respond, Maison pushed me into a closet and shut the door. It was really dark in there. Musty, too.

  I heard Maison’s mom enter the living room and say, “Have fun at school, honey. And if those boys give you any more trouble . . .”

  “Mom!” Maison said, sounding embarrassed.

  “I’m serious,” Maison’s mom said. “If I hear one more story about those eighth grade boys harassing you, I’m setting up a meeting with the principal.”

  The mustiness of the closet was really getting to me. I could feel a sneeze coming on.

  “Do you know what happened to the last kid whose mom talked to the principal about bullies?” Maison demanded. “The bullies got off scot-free, but the kid sure didn’t. The bullies knew he’d squealed and they went after him.”

  I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I sneezed.

  There was a moment of
silence in the living room.

  “What was that?” Maison’s mom asked.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Maison said quickly.

  “It sounded like a sneeze.”

  Footsteps made their way toward the closet. I tried to back up farther into the closet but there was no place to go. If Maison’s mom opened that door, she’d be staring right at me.

  “Look, Mom,” Maison said. “What do you think of my house?”

  The distraction worked. Maison must have been showing off the little house she’d made, because her mother gasped and said, “Oh, it really is amazing! I can’t wait for your teacher to see it.”

  “Don’t you have an important meeting today?” Maison asked. “Is all your paperwork ready?”

  “Ah, yes,” her mom said. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

  I could hear her mom’s footsteps walking away. I waited, barely breathing, still so embarrassed by my sneeze. Maison opened the closet door, and said, “Let’s go!”

  This time we made it out the front door without any problems.

  Outside it was raining lightly and Maison opened something called an “umbrella” up over us. She carefully balanced her little house in her arms. Dad had made a lot of impressive stuff, but he’d never thought of making an umbrella so we could walk in the rain without getting wet.

  “I’m really sorry about sneezing,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We worked it out.”

  Well, that was being kind of nice. She’d worked it out, not me. I’d just stayed in the closet and tried not to sneeze again.

  “I hope it doesn’t rain all day,” she said, already over the scare of being found out by her mom. “In P.E. we’re supposed to play baseball, but we can’t if it rains. You’d love baseball! I’m really good at it, especially at batting. That’s why I have the baseball bat.”

  “You mean that thing wasn’t a weapon?” I said, thinking back on how threateningly she’d held it when I’d first kerplunked into her room.

  “No,” she said. “It’s for playing sports. You know, it’s for fun.”

  But her spirits drooped as we neared the school building. There were a ton of other kids walking into the building, and it was a feast for my eyes. It was so crowded it was almost like its own little village. No one was blocky like me, and every single one of them had fingers on the edges of their hands. They all looked much more like Maison than me, except each person had at least slightly different skin and hair colors. They also had diverse body shapes—no square shapes, though. They all had backpacks hanging off their shoulders, and some of them were carrying books in their arms.

  I couldn’t help staring at them, and then I noticed they couldn’t help staring at me. Some kids would glance over, do a double-take, and then look away as if they didn’t want to appear rude. Others stared openly, their eyes getting bigger.

  “How are we going to explain me to them?” I whispered to Maison. If she’d been too scared to let her mom see me, I didn’t know how she was going to handle a whole building full of people.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I have it covered.”

  But it turned out we did have something to worry about. Just as we were reaching the steps of this giant building, two mobs stepped right in front of us, blocking our way.

  CHAPTER 11

  I COULD TELL FROM MAISON’S PANICKED FACE THAT THE two tough-looking boys in front of us must be the eighth graders she’d told me about. They basically looked like regular kids (I mean, regular for this world), except they were bigger and taller than us, which made me think of tall Endermen. I had to crane my head back to see their faces. These two looked a lot stronger than both Maison and me, and their smiles didn’t make me feel at all good about the situation.

  “Well, well, well, what do we have here, Dirk?” asked the one on the left.

  “I don’t know, Mitch,” the one on the right said with a smirk.

  “Move out of the way,” Maison said. “You’re blocking our way and it’s raining.”

  “Why, does rain make you melt?” teased Mitch.

  “It might make this one melt.” Dirk pointed a finger my way. “He doesn’t look right.”

  “Yeah, what’s wrong with this blockhead?” Mitch said. “Does he need a hospital?”

  “He’s my cousin,” Maison said. “He’s visiting the school today, and he has a rare food allergy that makes him swell up and get squarish. So don’t be rude and make fun of people for their allergies.”

  Dirk and Mitch exchanged Did-I-Hear-That-Right? glances.

  “I don’t know,” Mitch said. “He kinda looks like he’s from that video ga—”

  “Now move,” Maison repeated, interrupting him before he could finish his thought. She tried to walk past them, but as she did, Dirk reached out and snatched up her house.

  “What’s this?” he said in a baby voice. “A li’l doll house for your Bratz?”

  “Give that back!” Maison exclaimed, trying to grab it. Dirk held it out of her reach and tossed it over to Mitch.

  “Oh, look, the roof comes off,” Mitch said, pulling the small roof aside to look. “And it’s got cute little furniture!”

  “Aww,” Dirk wheezed. “Mind if we play with it for a bit?”

  “That isn’t yours!” She tried to grab the house again and failed because Mitch raised it up so high neither one of us could reach it. All I could do was stand there and stare—she was right, this wasn’t at all like the mobs back home. These guys were enjoying upsetting her.

  “You like baseball, right?” Mitch said. “We saw you playing after school the other day.”

  “Hey, yeah, she was a pretty good little batter,” Dirk said. “Let’s see how good of a catcher she is.”

  “Catch!” Mitch called, and sent the little house flying toward the school building. Maison cried out and ran after it. But her attempt to save it was pointless, and the house smashed into pieces against the school building, the bits of furniture scattered around it.

  Mitch and Dirk laughed in a way that sounded much worse than any noise a zombie could make. “Whoops, looks like you need more practice there!” Dirk hooted.

  “See ya, blockhead!” Mitch called to me, and the two of them ran off into the safety of the building.

  Some of the other kids had watched this happen, but now they all looked away. I realized none of them were going to step forward and help Maison. She was in this alone.

  No, I thought. I’m in this with her.

  She knelt before the broken pieces of her house, gathering a door here and a chair there. I could tell from her face how much she was struggling not to cry.

  “Maison,” I said, crouching next to her.

  “They’re awful!” she said, and then she was crying for real. “This is what they do every day and no one stops them!”

  “Can you hit them with a sword and make them go away?” I asked, at a loss. “They kind of remind me of Endermen because they’re so tall. One time my dad was fighting an Enderman with his diamond sword and—”

  “No, they’re not like Endermen and you can’t hit them with a sword!” she interrupted sharply. “This isn’t like your world. You can’t just swing a diamond sword here and make everything better. You can be violent in video games, but not for real!”

  I reached out and began to help her pick up the pieces. “We can put this back together,” I said. “I’ll help you. You know, just the other day I was working really hard on a tree house, and a creeper destroyed basically the whole thing.”

  With the broken pieces in our arms, we stepped into the school. I glanced around, and saw even more kids with even more backpacks. I also noticed how the walls were lined with little doorways that kids were opening and closing. The little doorways had books inside and kids were either putting more books in or taking some out. All this kind of reminded me of chests where Dad and I would keep our stuff, but I knew that couldn’t be right. Chests in the Overworld were square and brown and were
n’t attached to the wall like whatever these doorways were.

  I would have asked Maison what was going on with all those doorways but I knew now wasn’t the time. She was way too upset. Maison led me to one of those doorways, turned a little knob on it, and opened the door with a sharp clanging noise. She dropped her house pieces in there so I put my pieces in there, too, wanting to help.

  “That house took me months,” she said, rubbing at her wet face.

  I wasn’t very good at saying comforting things. It’s not like I exactly learned how from Dad, you know? But I wanted to say something that would make her feel better. As I opened my mouth to try, the school building let out a roar and I jumped straight into the air.

  Some of the other kids sighed but none of them panicked like me. Maison remarked blandly, “That bell means class starts in five minutes.” She slammed her doorway shut and turned to storm down the hallway. Helpless, I trotted along behind her.

  CHAPTER 12

  MAISON TURNED INTO A ROOM THAT SMELLED strongly of wood chips. There were several long tables laid out with kids our age sitting there. I let my eyes scan the room, noting the machinery along the back walls. This didn’t look anything like the tools I used at home to build. No pickaxes or shovels or swords in sight.

  There was someone at the front of the room, sitting behind a desk. “That’s the teacher,” Maison said and led me to her.

  “Ms. Reid,” Maison said to the teacher, “is it all right if my cousin Stevie visits the school today?”

  I was surprised she didn’t say anything about Dirk and Mitch. I was also surprised that Ms. Reid didn’t say anything about how Maison had clearly just been crying. Ms. Reid looked up from her desk, did the usual double-take on me, then quickly tried to act as if everything was normal. But she was still flustered.

  Maison told Ms. Reid the same story she’d told Dirk and Mitch about my allergy. “Stevie has a very rare allergy that sometimes makes him puff up and look blocky,” she said. “But he doesn’t like to talk about it, because it makes him feel different from the other kids.”