The Vase That Was Stuck Over My Head Muffled My Words

I got comfortable. I got comfortable really fast.

Once I was seated, Rose told me what was going to happen.

“You’re going to take me with you on this race,” she said. “And I’m going to make sure you win.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t interrupt me, kid. Once we’ve won, I’m going to take all of the prize money,” she continued. “Then, you’re going to fly this house to Pitchfork and help me break my brother out of jail. I figure I can use the prize money to hire some criminals to help us with that. I’m so glad that I read about the race in the newspaper. It’s what gave me this great idea. You see, my folks have been bugging me to break Benedict out of jail for weeks. You should be proud to know that out of all the amazing vehicles in this race, this is the one that I thought had the best chance of winning.”

The thought of breaking Benedict Blackwood out of jail was so terrifying and horrible that I immediately changed the subject. If I was forced to think about seeing that terrible man face-to-face, I might do something much worse than just burp.

“Where are my parents?” I asked in a shaky voice.

“They’re tied up in their bedroom,” Rose said as she walked over to the front door and locked it with a key that she must have taken from my parents. “Don’t worry. They’re both alright.”

“What about Aunt Dorcas?” I asked.

Rose shuddered.

“I tied her up in her bedroom as well. She kept complaining about being kicked by a horse and bleeding on the inside. I hope you don’t mind, but I tied a gag around her mouth to shut her up.”

“That’s fine,” I told her, wondering why we’d never thought to do that to Aunt Dorcas before. It seemed like such an obvious solution.

“So you understand my plan?” Rose asked. “I want to make sure that you do. The last thing I’d want would be for you to get hurt. I honestly care about your safety.”

She said it in a kind tone that made me want to believe her, but it’s very hard to believe that a person is kind when they’re pointing a gun at you. I told this to Rose, but she disagreed.

“I’m pointing the gun at you because I care,” she insisted. “It’s to remind you not to try anything stupid, like attempting to trick me or trying to take my gun from me. Please don’t even think about doing that, W.B. It would make me very sad if I had to hurt you. I’d cry about it for a week at least. Maybe even longer.”

“I wouldn’t be too happy about it either,” I assured her. “Well, I understand your plan, and I won’t do anything to stop you. Will you let me and my family go after your plan is done?”

“Of course,” Rose said, sounding almost surprised by the question. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Ummmm,” I hesitated before answering, “because you’re an evil villain?”

Rose rolled her eyes as she took off her hat and placed it on our coat rack.

“I’ve been very polite to you since we’ve met, haven’t I?”

I find it best to agree with people who might shoot me, so I nodded my head. I nodded so hard that I almost fell out of my chair.

“Do you know that I’ve had this gun for five years?” she asked. “And I’ve never shot it before. Never. Not once. I hate the idea of having to use it. Do you know any evil people who hate using their gun?”

I shook my head so hard that I actually did fall out of my chair.

Rose frowned at me.

“Maybe I should stop asking you questions. You don’t seem coordinated enough to answer. Why don’t you go to bed, W.B.? I’m going to need you to be nice and well-rested for me tomorrow.”

It seemed like a good idea. I picked myself up from the floor and ran up the stairs to my bedroom. Maybe I would wake up to find that this whole thing was nothing more than a terrible dream caused by a cheese sandwich.

I rested, but I didn’t rest well. I had another talking squirrel dream, but it wasn’t the one I usually have. This time I was the one trapped in a cage. There was a giant squirrel which had Rose Blackwood’s voice, and she was looking down at me. The giant squirrel laughed as she lifted my cage and threw it out of the flying Baron Estate. Before my cage crashed to the ground I awoke with a scream.

I opened my eyes.

Standing beside my bed was Rose Blackwood.

“Were you just screaming about squirrels?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, then get up and get dressed. I’ll need you to be ready in about five minutes.”

Rose started to walk out of my bedroom, but then she paused in the doorway.

“Don’t wear anything as ugly as what you were wearing yesterday, though. There are going to be lots of people taking pictures of us. I don’t want you to embarrass me.”

But before I could ask her what was wrong with the clothes I had worn yesterday, she was already gone, closing the door quietly behind her.

I joined Rose in the living room, dressed in what I thought was one of my nicer outfits. She looked at me and frowned.

“That’s still pretty awful,” she said, as she spit in her palm and tried to fix my unfixable hair. “But I suppose it’ll have to do. If any of these reporters ask who I am, I’m your sweet Auntie Rose. Got it? Tell them your parents are too busy steering the flying house to speak to them, so you and I will be the ones doing all the talking. Got it?”

I frowned as she fiddled with my hair, but of course I didn’t complain. Rose was dressed in one of Aunt Dorcas’s flowery dresses that buttoned high up on the neck, and she had slung one of her handbags over her shoulder. Her hair was put up in curls, and she wore a pair of Aunt Dorcas’s round spectacles on her nose. She no longer looked like a dangerous bandit. She looked like someone’s frumpy aunt, specifically my frumpy aunt. And my aunt is one of the frumpier aunts out there.

“How do I look?” she asked.

I was about to answer her honestly, but then I noticed that her handbag was slightly open. I could see her gun inside.

“You look like the prettiest woman in the world,” I told Rose.

“Really? Aren’t you sweet,” she said with a smile as she patted her curls. “Are you ready?”

Before I could answer, Rose flung open the front door to the Baron Estate. There was a shower of flashing lights, as there were dozens of people taking our picture with huge cameras set up on wooden legs. The crowd was even larger and louder than it was yesterday. Over a thousand people must have turned up to see all of the fantastic vehicles participating in the race.

A large stage had been set up across from the Baron Estate. There was a banner hanging from it that read “HORTENSE’S TOOTH POWDER! USE IT OR KISS YOUR TEETH GOODBYE!”

“How can a person kiss their own teeth?” I asked. Rose nudged me in the ribs.

Standing beneath the banner were three older men dressed in top hats and fancy suits. One of them held a cone shaped item in his hand, which Rose told me was a megaphone. He placed the smaller end of the megaphone to his lips and screamed out to the crowd:

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, cousins and aunts and uncles, second cousins, great uncles, great aunts, cousins twice removed, foster parents, stepbrothers, stepsisters, half aunts, double uncles, and people who are of no relation to anyone . . . welcome to the first annual Hortense’s Tooth Powder sponsored National Inventor’s Race Around the Country!”

The crowd cheered. Several men threw their hats into the air. The ones without hats threw their wigs.

“We have invited inventors from all over the country, who have brought their fantastically unique vehicles; vehicles in which they will ride around this great nation in search of items from this list!”

He held up a piece of paper. Several flashbulbs went off as people tried to get a picture of the list.

List? I didn’t remember M or P saying anything about a list.

“This list,” the man continued, “contains ten items. They are completely random and unimportant household items, things like shoe polish, oatmeal, and dish soap. The people participating in this race will need to collect a specific brand of each item. Each of these brands can only be found in one town in the country, unlike Hortense’s Tooth Powder, which is a brand that can be found nationwide. That’s right, Hortense’s Tooth Powder, treat your tooth to a toothy treat!”

“Hor-tense!” the other nicely-dressed men sang brightly as they waved their hands in a jazzy manner.

“Ahem. Anyway,” the man said as he cleared his throat, “people participating in the race will need to travel to these ten towns and retrieve the ten items from the list, so we know for certain you’ve actually made your way around the country. It is proof that you aren’t cheating. Once you’ve found all ten items, you will return here to Chicago. The first inventor to gather all ten items and return will be the winner and will be presented with five hundred dollars!”

The entire crowd went wild, cheering the idea of five hundred dollars.

“Isn’t it remarkable?” Rose whispered to me. “Five hundred dollars! Isn’t it exciting? Aren’t you excited?”

She was smiling at me and squeezing my shoulder tightly, as though we were best friends.

“Seeing as how you’re just going to steal the money from me and my family when we win,” I told her, “no, not really. I can’t say that I’m particularly excited.”

Rose frowned at me.

“Well, maybe you can just be happy for me. If our positions were switched I’d be polite enough to be happy for you.”

“Would you really?” I asked.

Rose thought about this for a moment.

“No,” she admitted. “Probably not.”

One of the men from Hortense’s Tooth Powder came up to the Baron Estate to hand us the list of items we’d need to collect to prove we’d made it around the country.

“My goodness,” he said as he looked in awe at the house. “This is fantastic. How did you get it to float here?”

“Not float, fly,” I corrected.

“My apologies. How did you get it to fly here?”

“We have a thousand parakeets hidden in the basement,” Rose told him with a smile as she reached for a copy of the list. “May I have our list, please?”

“Just a moment,” the man said. “Before I can give you a copy of this, we need to have your entry fee, please.”

Rose Blackwood frowned.

“Entry fee?” she asked. “What entry fee?”

“Five dollars and twenty-eight cents,” the man told her, “Otherwise, you cannot take part in the race.”

Rose turned to me with her mouth twitching. I could see she was having trouble seeing out of Aunt Dorcas’s glasses. She looked quite upset. I tried to smile widely at her to make her feel better, but she still frowned. I realized that I must have looked like a big blur to her because of the glasses, so I tried to smile even wider.

“My dear, young lad!” the well-dressed man scolded me. “Don’t make that horrible face at your mother. You look like a nauseated fish.”

“It’s alright,” said Rose. “And he’s my nephew, not my son. I would never let my son walk around dressed in silly clothes like that. W.B., do you happen to have five dollars and twenty-eight cents you can lend to your pretty auntie?”

She flashed a sweet smile at me.

“No,” I said. “But M and P do. I could go ask them for it.”

I turned to find my parents, but before I could take a single step, Rose’s hand gripped my wrist.

“That won’t be necessary, dear,” she said, giving my wrist a squeeze. “I will get it from them. Just stay here and don’t do anything foolish, alright?”

Shaking the handbag with her gun in it at me, Rose stumbled blindly down the hall to find my parents, bumping into the table, then the doorway, and then walking face first into the wall.

I stood there in the doorway with the man from Hortense’s Tooth Powder, who clearly had no idea what to say to me.

“So . . .” he said slowly, “do you like tooth powder?”

“Sure. It’s okay.”

Before he could think of another thing to ask me (presumably about tooth powder) a small kid shoved her way through the crowd and over to the Baron Estate. It was Shorty.

“Hey there, W.B.” she said with a bright smile. “Today’s the big day!”

While it was nice to see my new friend, I was still feeling pretty terrible about my current predicament. I wished that I could tell her what was happening with Rose Blackwood and my parents.

“Yup,” I told her and tried to smile back.

My mouth was fighting me. It really didn’t want to form a smile. So I had to force it, using all of the muscles in my cheeks as well as three of my fingers.

Shorty raised an eyebrow at me.

“What’s wrong with your face?” she asked. “You look like a chipmunk with hay fever.”

Apparently when I try to make myself smile I look like a sick animal.

“Nothing is wrong,” I told her, glancing over my shoulder. “I’m just waiting for my Aunt Rose to come back with the entry fee for the race.”

“Huh?” said Shorty, as she scratched her blonde curls. “Aunt Rose? I thought your aunt’s name was Dorcas. I remember you telling me that because it’s the silliest name I’ve ever heard.”

I could feel a drip of sweat run down my forehead. The Hortense’s Tooth Powder man was yawning and glancing at his pocket watch. I wanted very badly to tell Shorty that Rose wasn’t my aunt, that she was a villain who was planning on robbing us and forcing us to help her free the evilest man in the country from jail. But I couldn’t. If I said anything, who knows what Rose would do to M and P.

“It is,” I finally said to Shorty, and then I squeezed my lips together with my fingers.

Shorty raised her other eyebrow at me.

“OK. Well, in case I never see you again, I wrote you a letter,” she reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. “It has my address on it. Maybe when you get back to Pitchfork, you can write to me too.”

She handed me the letter. It was a very sweet gesture.

More importantly, it gave me an idea.

“Let me give you my address right now,” I told her. “Although you might need to wait a while before mailing me anything because my house will be flying around the country, and I don’t think the mailman will be able to catch it. Ummm, Hortense’s Tooth Powder man? Do you have an extra piece of paper I could borrow?”

The man gave me a little sheet of paper and a pencil. I wrote down my address, and at the top of the paper I wrote: ROSE BLACKWOOD!!!

I folded the paper and handed it to Shorty, who smiled.

“Thanks!” she said, and then she quickly hopped into the air and gave me a kiss on the cheek before disappearing back into crowd.

It was the first kiss I’d ever been given by anyone other than my mother or Aunt Dorcas, and those kisses didn’t really count. Especially not Aunt Dorcas’s, which were always so wet and gross and slimy and eggy and—oh my gosh she might actually be part egg.

“That’s very cute,” Rose said as she came back to the doorway. “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend, W.B. What’s her name?”

It took me a moment to remember Shorty’s real name.

“Iris,” I told her. “Her name is Iris.”

Rose smiled.

“There’s nothing lovelier than a woman named after a flower,” she said, and then turned to the Hortense’s Tooth Powder man and handed him the entry fee. “Here is our fee. May we have our copy of the list now, please?”

When the door was closed, Rose Blackwood took off Aunt Dorcas’s glasses, unpinned her hair, and pulled her gun from the handbag.

“Ooh, my head,” she said as she rubbed her eyes. “I understand why that woman is always complaining. If my eyes were that bad I’d probably go around wearing a pair of eye patches like my old Uncle Patches used to. Boy, I miss him. He died last year after accidentally riding a donkey backwards off a cliff. The poor guy never saw it coming.”

She glanced at the clock on the mantle and then quickly sat on the sofa and gripped the armrest.

“W.B., you might want to sit down or grab a hold of something,” she warned.

“Why?”

Suddenly the Baron Estate jerked to one side, and then to the other side. In an instant I was upside down at the other end of the room with a large vase stuck over my head.

“That’s why,” Rose said with a frown. “It’s 12:01. The race has officially started. Our first stop is in Stone Lake, Massachusetts. According to this list, we will need to find bottle of Stone Lake Shoe Polish. Are you ready?”

I tried to tell her that I was, but the vase that was stuck over my head muffled my words.