As I sit at the kitchen table eating a breakfast burrito, it’s time to take an inventory of the possible reasons for the terror in my armpit.
So far, I have identified the following potential answers:
- The bagel I ate for breakfast yesterday morning did it.
- Bun-Bun is living in my armpit eating snuffle sticks.
These don’t seem likely, or even reasonable, but our investigation of yesterday has taken a new turn. We have reached the gates of Colossal Chemistry, where I think we’ll make better progress. Maybe if I retrace my steps, something will jog my memory. The quest for answers continues!
Here’s what I remember about Colossal Chemistry.
Barker Mifflin led us all the way around the campus. Being a very sneakretive place, there’s a fourteen-foot-tall wall around the entire site with only one entrance.
“We passed the front doors somewhere back there,” I said as Barker led us farther along the wall. “Isn’t that the only entrance?”
“It’s boarded up,” said Barker. “And I’m pretty sure there’s a laser security system. If we try to go that way, we might trigger some sort of alarm.”
“I thought they were all gone?” Fen said. He had his scooter thrown over his back, held by a shoulder strap covered in anime patches.
“I’m not so sure,” Barker said. “I’ve seen the old security vans driving around here, making sure it’s sealed up good and tight. And there’s a website.”
“A website?” I asked. Barker Mifflin was probably overreacting, but he was also really smart. Maybe Colossal Chemistry still had people hanging around.
“It’s probably nothing,” said Barker. “Just someone who used to work here who has some worries.”
“Worries?” Fen said. “What kind of worries?”
“Here we are,” said Barker.
Barker was standing in front of a hole in the ground with a grate covering it.
“Please tell me this isn’t your plan,” I said.
Barker started digging around in his go bag.
“This is the plan.”
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to say that.”
“I never agreed to that.”
“It’s a sewer pipe,” I said. “And this is a terrible idea.”
“Not a sewer pipe,” Barker corrected as he pried the grate off the opening. He tossed it aside and looked into the hole. “It’s a drainpipe. I’m pretty sure it connects to one of the lower levels inside.”
Fen stuck his head in the hole. “Anyone down there?”
His voice echoed like the hole was deeper than I’d hoped.
“I’ll go first. You two follow me,” Barker said. He attached a light to his head and turned it on. “Into the belly of the beast.”
Before I could think of a good reason not to climb into the hole, Barker was already halfway down the metal ladder. The kid could really move. Thinking back on it now, there were at least three things I could have said at that point:
- There’s probably a badger den or a skunk family at the bottom of this hole.
- There could be zombies at the bottom of this hole.
- There is something at the bottom of this hole that will end up in my armpit.
But I didn’t say any of those things. I stared at my shoes while Fen followed Barker down into the darkness and disappeared. What was I going to do, go home?! As a newly minted best friend of mine, you probably already know that was never going to happen. When I was standing on the roof of my house with a golf umbrella over my head hoping for a stiff wind, did I climb down? I did not! It’s not in my nature to miss an opportunity to climb into a hole or jump into a rose bush. It just isn’t going to happen.
The first thing I realized about the way down was that the ladder we were using was made of metal and it was cold on my hands. And by cold I mean ho-ho-ho polar ice cap cold. These ladder rungs were like popsicles. And according to my internal calendar system, which runs entirely on the number of days before summer break, we were firmly at the hot end of the year. There was only a week of school left and it was warm outside.
“Does anyone else think these ladder rungs are colder than they should be?” I yelled down the tube we had all willingly gotten into. “It’s like eighty degrees outside.”
“It’s science, Jen-Jen,” Fen yelled back. “As soon as you go underground the temperature drops like fifty degrees.”
“Maybe in Sweden, but I don’t think that’s right in Nevermind,” I said. “Also, my name is Jenny.”
“I can see my breath in the headlamp,” Barker said. “It’s definitely colder than it should be down here. We’re in a legitimate survivalist situation.”
When Barker Mifflin says we’re in survival mode, the smart thing to do is run the other way. He has a sixth sense for this sort of thing. I found the bottom of the ladder and I was standing on a sheet of ice for about one nanosecond and then I was flat on my back.
“It’s slippery down here,” Fen whispered.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
“Come on Jenny, we gotta move,” Barker said. “It’ll keep us warm.”
We crawled and slid through a tunnel that was barely big enough to fit through and I kept thinking we were about to stumble into a den of wolverines. Or maybe they were behind me, cutting off the exit, and this would be my final resting place, trapped with two bozos I was dumb enough to follow into a frozen grave.
I heard a banging sound and then the sound of another grate clanging on the concrete floor.
“Okay, I think we’re in,” Barker said from somewhere ahead of me.
I kept going until I reached the end of the tunnel and then I stood up in a corridor with flickering lights that went to the left and the right.
“Do you feel that?” Barker asked. He was staring at me so the headlamp was in my face. It was like a big, blinding, cyclops eyeball.
“Any chance you could turn that thing off?” I asked.
The light flicked off and there was Barker, holding a piece of paper in his hand.
“Do you feel it?” Barker asked again.
“I’m sorry, what are we supposed to be feeling?” I asked.
“It’s not cold anymore.”
“Hey you’re right!” Fen said. “That’s actually kind of weird.”
I looked down and realized the floor was no longer icy under my feet.
“Why would they keep a tunnel to the outside so cold?” I asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Come on, I’ve got a map of the place,” Barker said, waving the paper he held. “Let’s go this way.”
We started walking down the corridor as the ceiling lights blinked on and off. The way was narrow, with dull gray walls. Hallways darted off to the left and right, seeping into darkness, full of unknown dangers I could only imagine. If I’m being totally honest, it felt like the kind of place in a movie where bad things happen.
“How’d you get a map of the layout?” Fen asked.
“It’s just a rough estimate,” Barker said. “I found it on that website I was telling you about. There should be some stairs right around this corner.”
Sure enough, there were stairs leading up to a door that was propped open. We made our way up and out of the corridor.
“Whoa,” Fen said. “It’s huge in here!”
It was huge, much bigger than I’d expected.
“It’s like the old food court,” I said. “At the Nevermind Mall. Remember that?”
“I used to get soft pretzels and ice cream there,” Barker mumbled, but I could tell his brain was somewhere else. He was taking it all in.
Fun fact: Nevermind did have a mall once, but it closed a few years ago. There’s a rumor going around it’s infested with zombies who shop for shoes and handbags all day.
“When did the mall close?” Fen asked.
“Two or three years ago,” I said. “I think it’s full of zombies now.”
“Good to know,” Fen said.
“This place does look a lot like the old mall,” Barker said. “There’s this giant open space in the middle, and glassed rooms around the edges, just like a food court.”
The glassed rooms were also large, but they were dark inside and far away so we couldn’t see inside.
“Let’s split up, see what we can find,” Barker said. “If you stumble onto anything interesting, yell.”
And just like that, Barker Mifflin was gone. He moved fast when he was ready to go, and that left me and Fen Stenson standing at the top of the stairs.
“Wanna stick together?” I asked.
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
And so we ventured further inside the Colossal Chemistry building, peeking into rooms and trying light switches that didn’t do anything. Some of the rooms were full of examination tables and lots of medical equipment; other rooms had metal desks with computers on them. At some point, I got separated from Fen and found myself standing alone in an orange room with two green tables. There were monitors on the walls and heavy metal drawers with combination locks.
And there was something else.
“What’s this thing?” I asked out loud, because it was such a curious little object. Sitting on the floor, right at the corner of one green table leg, was an orange ball about the size of a marble. The marble-shaped object was covered in a layer of peach fuzz. And it was glowing.
“Hey little buddy,” I said.
I bent down and pushed the furry marble with my finger. It rolled a few inches, stopped, and then it glowed and went dark in a slow pattern that felt sad and lonely. Thrum, thrum, thrum. I felt bad for the lost little object, so I reached out and picked it up. It felt soft in my hand, like a cotton ball, and it glowed brighter, like it was happy to be picked up.
“Are you lost?” I asked. “You look lost.”
The fuzzy marble glowed brighter still, and all at once, it was too hot to hold—like a burning coal from a fire. I screamed and flicked the furry marble out of my hand, and then things got even weirder.
The furry ball crumbled into orange dust and drifted toward the floor.
Barker Mifflin and Fen Stenson arrived, worried because of the scream.
“What’s wrong?” Barker asked.
“You okay?” Fen added.
“Yeah, I’m . . . I’m fine. I touched something but it’s gone now.”
“Touched what?” Barker asked. He seemed a lot more concerned than the situation called for.
“It was nothing, just a fuzzy marble thing. But it disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Fen said. “You mean it rolled away?”
“No I mean I dropped it and then . . . I guess it exploded or something. It’s just gone.”
And then Barker Mifflin said something that is now ringing in my ears like a siren in my bedroom back home.
“Why is your hand in your armpit?”