Milo didn’t hear Mom coming.
But he definitely felt her hands on his shoulders, shaking him to pieces!
Milo was still half-dreaming, and somehow the shaking made him think he wasn’t a boy at all, but a jar of colorful sprinkles or a bottle of ants. Or maybe both!
What would candy-coated ants taste like?
Milo opened his eyes.
Right there, centimeters away and ready to scare the actual snot out of him, was Mom’s face. Like she was stuck under one of his magnifying glasses, blown up so big and close he could see bits of gray eye-shadow dust clinging to her eye-bags! A single witchy hair sprang from a small mole on her cheekbone.
Did Mom ever wonder what candy-coated ants taste like? Had Dad?
Milo wanted to ask. But Milo was too big for questions like that.
“Up, Milo.”
Mom hadn’t tried to pull Milo’s headphones off since the first week! Maybe that was because she hated the sound of him screaming himself raw (Milo hated the sound, too, because what a racket!). But Milo had been living without good ears for basically ages. By now he could pretty much read her lips!
Or maybe she only ever said things she’d already said before?
“Next time wear the earbuds to bed. You’ll put a crick in your neck.”
Dad’s bulky old headphones did make it so Milo could only sleep on his back. They turned Milo into a sad turtle turnover. But he didn’t mind putting a crick in his neck! Having a crick in his neck made Milo feel older.
Older people were wiser people. Milo knew for a fact older people got to make more decisions than he did. They didn’t even have to be good decisions, either. There was an old man at Glen’s Groceries who mostly decided to feed Cheetos to pigeons. All the time! Cheese wasn’t good for a Milo-size stomach, let alone tiny bird stomachs. Nobody told that old guy to think how scary the world would be if birds started pooping orange.
Nope. Old men just woke up with cricks in their necks and got to do whatever they wanted, and no one made them go to school.
And anyhow. Ana used to tell Milo he was a pain in the neck all the time. He should get to know the feeling. Mean or not, Milo missed hearing from Ana. He missed hearing from anyone. Maybe if he got crickety and old, Hank would finally talk to him.
Don’t count your chickens, Milo told himself. Whatever that meant.
When Mom returned, she was dressed for work, wearing brown shoes and a blue dress with red flowers on it. Her thumbs settled on Milo’s collarbones (she didn’t have to be so careful; Milo wasn’t a baby!).
“Milo. Up! Please.”
Again Mom retreated. Mango-y perfume chased her out.
Milo curled himself inward. He tightened his body into a spiral of sheets, the world’s largest snailboy, and tried his hardest to hear only the crackling sound of Thom Yorke’s voice.
He tried to imagine it was Dad’s voice instead. But it was really hard to think of a reason why Dad would be singing about fake plastic trees. Could they have built a tree house in one? What would a plastic tree even look like?
What if they were just like the potted plants in waiting rooms? Milo thought he must have seen a whole plastic jungle by now, geez.
This time Mom didn’t shake him. She pushed her hands into the space beneath his arms and lifted him up, up, up. She pulled him close like he wasn’t way too big for this.
She tapped on his right earphone. Milo let her tug it aside.
He held his breath and heard the dreaded Roaring Nothing!
The Roaring Nothing was a blanket of sound like river rapids or maybe like an army of minuscule legs! The Roaring Nothing stampeded through the unplugged holes Milo used to call ears! The Roaring Nothing crawled over the bumpy surface of his brain like sour-candy ants!
The Roaring Nothing made Milo fill his lungs!
He wanted to make a racket to drown it out, to tell it no—
Just in time came Mom’s deep voice, right against Milo’s skull. It shook the hairs of his cowlick. “Milo, please.”
He let the air out, a little like a tired old man.
“Think of all the people who want to see you.”
People who want to see me do what? Milo mouthed. He couldn’t hear himself. This didn’t mean he planned on shouting for his entire life, are you kidding? Milo planned to live until he was at least thirty-seven. That was another thirty years. Shouting that whole time would be another real pain in the neck.
“How about Antonio? I bet he’s sorry he missed your birthday party.”
Yeah, right! Antonio hadn’t known what to do with Milo even before the stripy fumigation tent transformed the Vasquez family into Eustace’s very own circus performers! Dr. Ruby had told Milo that the tent was a ruse, that usually tents like that meant the people inside were gone and termites were being gassed or something.
But the house never even had termites! There was never gas in the tent. Milo and his family stayed inside the whole time, pretending to be normal …
Come see the human sprinkle boy! Tastes like real ants!
Those tent walls had warned everyone to keep away. The stripes held the same kind of magic as the patterns on deadly coral snakes. Those snakes were red and yellow, but black too, which meant they were poisonous.
But in school Milo had learned about another kind of snake, a special snake that copied the stripes of the venomous coral snake to scare off predators. These snakes weren’t deadly at all! They acted tough, but might be pretty nice if you got to know one.
“Milo? Please.” Mom replaced Milo’s headphone and slipped away.
Milo tried playing opossum one more time.
Years ago, Dad’s old Chevy had flattened the orange-dirted back roads leading into Eustace and they’d seen an opossum in the road.
Dad slammed the brakes and a pair of Spanish swearwords escaped him. He pulled on his gloves and told Milo to stay in the car. He was embarking on a rescue mission.
Milo watched Dad pick the giant rat up by its tail, supporting its sagging tummy with one hand. Dad dropped the opossum in the dust just past the shoulder and climbed back into the truck.
They sat on the side of the road for forever, until they were sticking to the vinyl seats. Milo picked at the rubber soles of his shoes. Back then, he never minded when things were quiet.
Finally Dad twisted the key in the ignition. “Guess not. Sorry, Mi—”
“DAD, LOOK!”
The engine coughed! The opossum came alive!
Milo watched the rodent jerk to its tiny pink feet and waddle into the bear grass along the road, quick as a tightly twisted wind-up toy. Its wormy tail was there after one blink, gone after another. Poof.
Milo gaped wide enough to catch maybe a zillion flies. “How did you know that would happen?”
“Magic, papi.”
Dad was that kind of person: he’d help you even if you weren’t a person. He’d help you even if you were already dead!
If Milo could play opossum for a little longer this morning, he pinkie-promised himself, by the time he got up maybe he’d have enough energy to sprint, not just waddle.
Or maybe if he played dead long enough, Mom would realize that he’d been telling the truth for the past month: Milo definitely couldn’t go to school with the other kids. Dr. Ruby was wrong when she said his hearing was fine. Dr. Ruby didn’t live in a tiny waxy house inside Milo’s ears, so what did she know? Dr. Ruby was a bony lady in a white coat. What kind of person wore heavy white coats in the dirty desert?
Mom reappeared in the doorway, screwing an earring into her earlobe. Milo saluted her. He got up and pulled socks from the floor onto his feet.
In Milo’s headphones, Thom Yorke sang about a nice dream. Milo sighed. Probably it had nothing to do with being a bottle of sprinkles.
The moment Mom clomped away, the shirt of Milo’s space pajamas got caught on his headphones. That was not what made him swear twice in Spanish.
Milo was certain there was even a whole nursery rhyme about the friendlier snakes that weren’t coral snakes. Definitely!
It was just … Milo couldn’t seem to remember it.