APRIL FOOLS

Some kids love Halloween more than any other holiday. Some love Thanksgiving the most, or the Fourth of July. Not me. Those are all great holidays. I like candy and turkey and fireworks. But, more than anything else, I love playing pranks on people. I was born for April Fools’ Day. And it was almost here. Today was the last day in March. Tomorrow was the day I’d been waiting for all year.

I like to play pranks on my parents and my friends, of course, but it’s especially fun to play jokes on my little brother, Ethan. He’s only six, so he’s pretty easy to fool. It was also fun to scare him a bit ahead of time.

Right after Mom and Dad tucked him in and came downstairs, I said, “I should tell Ethan a bedtime story.”

“How sweet of you,” Mom said as I headed upstairs.

Oh, it would be sweet, all right. And not just tonight. I would have a totally sweet time tomorrow. But Ethan wouldn’t. He’d be suffering through a whole day of jokes.

When I got to his room he was half asleep, looking all cute, innocent, and helpless in his spaceman pajamas, covered with spinning planets and zooming comets. Ethan is crazy about space. I think that’s because he’s as weird as an alien from Mars.

“It’s almost here,” I said, making my voice mysterious and spooky.

“I know,” he said.

That surprised me. Ethan usually seemed totally clueless about holidays. But I kept going. “April Fools’ Day is coming, especially for you.”

Before I could tack on an evil laugh, he said, “I’ve been waiting all my life for this.”

That made no sense. He was six. So he’d already lived through April Fools’ Days a bunch of times. Though I guess he wouldn’t remember the first two or three. “All your life?” I asked.

“Ever since last week when I was born,” he said.

That was so weird, I decided to ignore it. Then, I figured out what was going on. He was trying to pull an April Fools’ joke on me. Good luck with that. First of all, it wasn’t April Fools’ Day until tomorrow. And second, I was the expert. Nobody was going to fool me. Especially not a little kid who still needed help tying his shoes and didn’t seem to know how long ago he’d been born. I was just way too clever to be tricked by him. But I decided to play along, because it would be fun watching his pathetic effort to fool me. And maybe it would give me an idea for an awesome joke to play on him tomorrow.

“You were born last week?” I asked.

He nodded. “That’s in Zoopersnooper weeks,” he said. “Our days are longer than yours, Earthling. But we have many of the same holidays.”

“That’s great…” I struggled to keep from laughing. Zoopersnooper—what a ridiculous little-kid idea for the name of an alien planet. I would have done way better. Zardox. Phongo. Mixultra. See? I wasn’t just great at coming up with pranks. I was also totally awesome at making up names for planets.

“See you tomorrow,” I said as I headed out of his room.

Now, I just needed to think up the perfect stunt to play on my alien brother.

Got it! I’m always awake before him, even though he goes to bed earlier. Tomorrow morning, I’d sneak into his room right before he woke up, and scare him with an alien mask. I didn’t have one, but I could make something pretty easily. It didn’t even have to be all that good, since it would be sort of dark in his room in the morning.

We had a craft box downstairs, with all sorts of supplies. It wasn’t hard to cut a mask out of some green felt, and give it huge white eyes with slitted black pupils. I poked a small hole on each side of the mask and tied some rubber bands together to make a strap.

The next morning, I slipped the mask over my face and crept into Ethan’s room. Then I stood over his bed and got ready to give him the scare of a lifetime. I had to keep from laughing and spoiling the surprise. This was going to be amazing.

“April Fools!”

I froze.

Ethan had sat up fast and shouted the words before I could say them. He thrust out both hands, pointing all ten fingers at me. I was dazzled by a flash as tiny lightning bolts shot from his hands.

And then, I was falling.

I was so startled, I screamed. I tried to figure out where I was. That wasn’t easy, because I was spinning as I fell. I screamed again when the terrifying answer hit me. I was plunging down from the clouds, right toward the mouth of an active volcano that was spewing red-hot lava into the air.

“Help!” I screamed.

Lava shot up at me.

Ethan stood on the rim of the volcano, laughing. The heat didn’t seem to bother him. He had a stick in one hand and a bag of marshmallows in the other. I realized he was toasting one of them over the volcano.

Just when the heat became almost unbearable, Ethan shouted, “April Fools!” and thrust his hands out again, zapping me with more lightning bolts.

After another dazzling flash, I was bobbing in the ocean. But I wasn’t on Earth. The water was red. But not red enough to hide the worst part. Huge eels with hundreds of teeth raced toward me, snapping their jaws.

Ethan floated next to me, eating marshmallows. “Isn’t this great?” he asked. “I really fooled you.”

“No! It’s not great. Bring me home,” I begged.

“No way,” he said. “I love April Fools’ Day.”

Dark shapes wriggled toward me beneath the surface of the water. Right before the first eel chomped me, Ethan sent us into freezing cold outer space, and then into a jungle filled with giant mosquitoes. He let one of them stab me in the leg before zipping us to a nightmare of a planet that was far too close to its sun. He held up a bag of popcorn and laughed as the kernels popped from the heat.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. Hang on, I told myself. It’s just one day. And then it will be over.

But hours later, after I’d suffered countless horrors, I realized something. Ethan was six. At least, he was six in Earth years. But he’d said he’d been born last week. I tried to do the math as I hurtled toward a black hole that threatened to rip my atoms apart, and then got dragged by wild creatures across an endless valley of sharp gravel, but it was hard to think when Ethan kept shouting, “April Fools!” and laughing hysterically as he munched a variety of snacks.

Six years was … I did a rough estimate. Six times three-hundred-sixty … It was about twenty-one hundred days.

I screamed as I dropped into the gaping jaws of a lizard the size of a small city and slid down its throat.

So, if that was one week for Ethan …

I was up to my neck in what seemed to be sewage, struggling to do math while my mind was much more interested in discovering how many different types of screams I could produce.

Twenty-one divided by seven is three.

“No!” I shouted when it hit me that each of his alien days was about three hundred of my Earth days. “Stop!”

Ethan stared at me with eyes that no longer seemed human. Or kind.

“Stop?” He let out a laugh that chilled me, despite the fact that I was currently buried up to my neck in burning sand while centipedes nibbled at my ears. “Are you kidding? We’ve barely started.”

I now knew three things for sure. First, and worst, my little brother really was an alien who was far better than I was at thinking up ways to make his sibling suffer. Second, it was going to be an unimaginably long and totally terrible day. And third, I needed to find a new favorite holiday—assuming I survived this one.