Alien in My Pocket #4 Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 01: Late

  Chapter 02: Lemon Head

  Chapter 03: Late Again

  Chapter 04: Olivia + Mike + Amp

  Chapter 05: On Being Lazy

  Chapter 06: Egg on My Face?

  Chapter 07: Egghead

  Chapter 08: Sleepyhead

  Chapter 09: Egg Drop Derby

  Chapter 10: Runaway

  Chapter 11: Doodles

  Chapter 12: Egg Ball

  Chapter 13: Ring-a-Ding

  Chapter 14: Couching Concerns

  Try It Yourself: The De-Eggcelerator

  Excerpt from Alien in My Pocket #5: Ohm vs. Amp

  Chapter 01: My Secret Roommate

  Chapter 02: Sound the Alarm

  Chapter 03: Party Crasher

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Late

  My legs are spaghetti.

  Or socks filled with pancake batter.

  Or octopus tentacles.

  Or wait: soggy wet beach towels.

  That’s it: my legs are soggy octopus tentacles in dress socks filled with spaghetti and pancake batter.

  At least that’s what it felt like as I rode my bike to school. I was exhausted.

  And Amp was to blame for it all, of course.

  He made me miss my bus . . . again! Third time in one week. That was a new record.

  My dad drove me to school the first two times, but this time he had a big presentation at work.

  So there I was, riding my bike as fast as I could to get to a spelling test that I hadn’t studied for.

  My life was a mess. Before my pesky blue alien crash-landed his crummy spaceship into my bedroom, I had a fairly regular life. I played baseball. I got decent grades. I slept eight to ten hours a night. Now I had Amp to worry about. It’s like he travelled a bajillion miles through space and time just to get on my nerves. And oh, yeah, to scout Earth to see if it was worth invading.

  My best friend, Olivia, is the only other person who knows about Amp, but she gets to go home at the end of the day.

  Here’s some friendly advice: never adopt an alien.

  Trust me.

  I leaned into the corner of Jacob Drive at full speed and my overly stuffed backpack almost sent me spilling to the pavement.

  That’s when I saw them up ahead in the middle of the street: a pack of hulking black crows standing around like a gang of misfits waiting to steal my lunch money.

  Crows give me the creeps. I don’t know why, but they make me uneasy. They are bad news . . . with wings.

  I leaned over my handlebars, tapped into whatever strength remained in my watery legs, and rode right at them. They squawked and screeched and flew out of my way at the last possible second. “HA!” I shouted. “Out of the street, you turkeys!”

  Seconds later, I roared toward the bike racks outside of Reed Elementary School. I felt like a knight returning from a successful battle, ready to give the king good news.

  But my smile disappeared almost instantly.

  My bike wasn’t slowing down. I squeezed the brake levers on my handlebars. Nothing. I had no brakes! I was going full speed at the first bike rack!

  One last thought shot through my brain before impact: THIS IS YOUR FAULT, AMP!

  Lemon Head

  At least I had gotten out of the spelling test.

  I was now lying in my bed trying like crazy to find a silver lining.

  I wasn’t dead.

  And the arm that now hung in a sling wasn’t my throwing arm. (I’m a lefty, but I throw right-handed. Go figure.) If you’re going to dislocate your shoulder, it’s best not to destroy your baseball career at the same time.

  The phone rang. I could hear my mom say hello to Coach Lopez. “Apparently, somebody stole his bike brakes,” she explained to him. “I know—weird. But Zack wanted me to mention that it’s his left arm. His throwing arm sustained no damage. He even wrote that down for me. How cute is that?”

  “Mom!” I yelled down, and she stopped her conversation and said, “Yes, Zacky?” But I couldn’t think of how to tell her that she wasn’t supposed to tell him that she was reading my instructions without making matters worse! “Nothing.” I sighed, and she went back to talking to Coach Lopez while I propped myself up in my bed.

  My head was loopy from the pain pills. I felt mentally jumbled. My brain kept wandering off. My skull felt like it was filled with lemonade and goldfish.

  But at least my shoulder didn’t hurt too badly.

  I wondered if my little bike rack incident would make the yearbook. That’d be so embarrassing, but also kind of cool if they gave my accident a whole page.

  Luckily, classes were about to start when the ambulance finally arrived, but a decent-sized crowd had still hung around. I remember hearing the mix of different voices as I lay wedged between two bikes.

  “Is he dead?” someone wondered.

  “Who taught that idiot how to ride a bike?”

  “Don’t be mean—maybe he’s blind.”

  “That’s ridiculous, why would a blind kid ride a bike to school?”

  “Who is it?”

  “I think it’s Shane Kerr.”

  “No, that’s Debbie Finster,” another kid corrected her. He sounded so sure. “Her dad is my dentist.”

  “Oh, yeah, that was Debbie for sure,” a girl said sadly. I took particular interest in her use of the past tense.

  Principal Luntz was the first adult on the scene. “I should have known it would be you, Zack McGee,” was all he said. He shook his head at me with a frown, as if I had meant to pop my arm bone from its socket just to avoid a spelling quiz.

  The ride in the back of an ambulance was pretty much what you’d expect: it smelled like medicine, you couldn’t see where you were going, and they didn’t play music. Apparently, a dislocated shoulder doesn’t merit using the siren, which was a little disappointing.

  Now here I was, in my bed, my baseball season ruined—and I had a combination lemonade stand and aquarium open for business in my head.

  I hadn’t seen the hamster-sized alien who’d made me late in the first place since I got home. He was probably hiding. Amp knew he’d get an earful when he came out. I didn’t remember dozing off, but I must have.

  I dreamed of crows chewing the brakes off my bike as I served them cups of cold lemonade poured directly from my nose.

  Maybe we should start breaking those big white pain pills in half.

  Late Again

  The most annoying thing about living with an alien is the impact it has on your sleep.

  Since Amp’s crippled spaceship dented my bedroom wall, getting a good night’s sleep had become about as likely as catching a one-eyed unicorn that burps rainbows and farts lightning.

  On the planet Erde, there’s no such thing as sleep. Amp doesn’t understand why I need it. He ignores my complaints about being woken up all the time. It’s like living with a misfiring cuckoo clock.

  But thanks to the mind-bending pain pills, I actually had a full night’s rest. Even a four-inch-tall alien on my chest couldn’t wake me before I was ready.

  “It’s about time,” Amp said in his strange, high-pitched voice.

  “Thanks for your concern about my arm,” I said with a sigh.

  “Yes, I see you have a boo-boo.”

  “A boo-boo? I almost died!”

  “That device on your arm doesn’t indicate a severe injury,” he said, stroking his chin.

  “Oh, thanks a lot, Doctor Amp,” I said. “I have a rash I’d like you to take a look at when you’re done.”

  “Whoa! Grumpy . . .”

  “You’re
to blame for all this, you know.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “You made me late for school.”

  “How exactly did I do that?”

  “Let’s start with the fact that your people are about to invade Earth. That doesn’t help.” I ran my fingers through my hair with the hand from my good arm. “Plus, somebody stole the brake cables on my bike. That’s why I crashed.”

  I waited for sympathy, but Amp was silent. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You look gassy. Please don’t fart right now. I’m not sure I can run away.”

  “You rode your bike?” he said in a faraway voice. “You never ride your bike on school days.”

  “I know, but I missed the bus. Remember? I was helping you fix a switch on your lame rocketship.”

  “But I thought your father was going to drive you!”

  “He already drove me twice this week. He said my lateness was a character flaw.”

  “You can’t argue with that,” Amp said quietly.

  “Whatever. He had a big presentation and couldn’t drive me, and Mom had already left for work.”

  Amp was now pacing in front of the alarm clock. I could see it was 11:30 a.m. Wow, that really was a good night’s sleep!

  “I should have told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “I borrowed those brake wires when you were at school on Monday.”

  “Why on Earth would you do that!?!” I shouted.

  “As you know, my landing system didn’t function when I arrived here, so I was trying to fix the braking flaps on my . . .” His voice trailed off when he saw the look on my face. He backed farther away from me. “Easy now, Zack.” He looked nervous. “Remember, you have a boo-boo.”

  “I should have known it was you,” I said between gritted teeth.

  With a groan, I started to get up, but pain shot through my shoulder. He instantly disappeared from sight, using one of his alien mind-control abilities.

  “Your Jedi tricks don’t work on me anymore, Amp,” I said. It was true; I had been teaching myself how to to deflect his invisible brain signals. At that instant, I saw him scamper across my bookshelf. “I SEE YOU!”

  He sort of blinked on and off in my vision as I concentrated on blocking his mind trick. He dove off the bookshelf and ran across the carpet and into the closet.

  “You better hide, you little blue headache.”

  Honestly, my arm hurt too much to actually chase him. It hurt just to swing my legs off my bed. I stared at the wall, my anger at Amp boiling.

  Just then, there was a knock on my door

  “Zack, it’s time for your pill, and you have a visitor,” Mom sang through the door.

  I knew who the visitor was before the door opened.

  “Come on in, Olivia,” I groaned.

  Olivia + Mike + Amp

  I washed down my pain pill as Olivia swept into my room like she owned the place. That’s how she is.

  She had a stack of worksheets from school in one hand, a roll of SweeTarts for Amp in the other, and one of those clear plastic pet balls under her arm.

  Inside the plastic ball was her new hamster, which she had named Mike, which must be the most inappropriate name for a hamster ever.

  I had suggested a whole list of great names.

  “How about Ace?” I had pleaded. “Or Skittles? Or PopTart? Or Yoda? Or Brownie? Buttercup? Fuzzface? Nibbles? Shaggy? Tinkerbell? Sparky? Monkey Butt? You can even name it Bubba. It’s so cute I could puke!”

  Olivia was having none of it. “No way,” she’d said. “He’s Mike.”

  She placed Mike in his ball onto the carpet. Mike instantly started rolling around, exploring my messy room. Olivia toed my open door shut so Mike wouldn’t wind up bouncing down the stairs by accident.

  She tossed the short stack of fluttering worksheets onto my desk. “Those are from the lovely Miss Martin,” she said. She looked around and didn’t see Amp, so she tossed the roll of SweeTarts on top of the worksheets.

  “All those worksheets are from one day?” I croaked.

  “Yesterday and today,” she said matter-of-factly. “Today is Friday, Zackaroni. You missed Thursday altogether. You’re piling up the makeup tests like crazy.”

  I groaned. “I almost died. You’d think Miss Martin would cut me some slack and let me miss a few tests. And what are you doing here? It’s not even noon. Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I convinced Miss Martin I needed to come see you and bring you your work. Cheer you up. I told her you needed a lot of cheering up.”

  “You’re shameless,” I said, shaking my head. “Anything to get out of school, right?”

  She didn’t answer. She sat roughly on the corner of my bed and stared at me.

  “Don’t shake the bed,” I said, closing my eyes. “It hurts.” I could feel her staring at my sling. “How’s Mike doing?” I asked, just to say something.

  She sighed. “He poops a lot.”

  “You must be so proud.”

  “So why did you ride into the bike racks? That was really stupid.”

  Olivia can be direct that way.

  I opened one eye. “Amp stole my brake cables. No brakes.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why you were going so fast.”

  “There was a flock of crows,” I said quietly. “I rode through them.”

  “What is it with you and crows?” she whispered.

  “They looked sinister,” I said, using one of our vocabulary words. Olivia didn’t notice.

  “Did you know a group of crows is called a murder?” she told me.

  “Seriously?” I shouted, wincing at the pain that shot up my arm.

  “You rode through a murder.”

  Olivia knew more worthless information than anybody. If she said a bunch of crows was a called a murder, she was right.

  “So why didn’t you drag your feet on the ground?” she asked, changing the subject like a dancing prizefighter. “You could have slowed your bike down by dragging your feet on the ground.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, throwing my good arm up. “I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to think.”

  “Olivia is right,” Amp spoke up from somewhere near my desk.

  “He dares to show his face?” I said.

  “Council Note—”

  Even without looking, I knew he had turned his back and was now speaking into the device he wore on his wrist.

  “Please, not now, Amp,” I pleaded. “You know those recorded reports for your bosses on planet Erde make me crazy.”

  He shushed me and continued.

  “Council Note: Earthlings do not seem familiar with drag. Any pressure distributed over a body in motion exerts a force on that moving body, the sum of which, of course, reduces overall velocity, or speed, in a given direction. Friction, or resistance, as from dragging your shoes on the ground while you’re riding your bike, dramatically increases drag, reducing the overall speed of the body in motion.”

  “You may as well be speaking Erdian,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Seems pretty clear to me,” Olivia said.

  Amp was standing on my desk and, now that his report was concluded, began opening the SweeTarts wrapper. “The friction between your shoes and the ground would have absorbed a great deal of the kinetic energy.”

  “SAYS THE GUY WHO STOLE THE BRAKES!” I shouted.

  “There were a few things you could have done,” Olivia said. “But you’ve never been very clear-thinking in emergencies.”

  “I agree with Olivia,” Amp said, flicking SweeTarts into his mouth.

  Here I was, wondering if I’d ever play another baseball game in my life, and they were busy criticizing me.

  Sorry, but death by bike rack does not foster a lot creative ideas.

  My eyes felt moist. I blinked away the start of some tears. I didn’t want to cry in front of Olivia.

  Instead, I cleared my throat and calmly said, “I think I need to r
est.”

  On Being Lazy

  “Oh my gosh, Olivia, get him off me!” I yelped. “He’s gonna poop.”

  I’m not sure if I had drifted off to sleep for a moment or not, but Olivia had apparently taken Mike out and let him roam free.

  “Chill, dude. They’re just teeny-tiny hamster poops,” Olivia said.

  “They’re still gross,” I said. “I eat in this bed!”

  Amp was about to finish off the last of the SweeTarts Olivia had brought him. Candy crumbs covered the crossword puzzle worksheet that was at the top of my stack of homework.

  Amp wasn’t just a sloppy eater; he was a lazy eater, too. His diet consisted mostly of SweeTarts and Ritz crackers. Just one of his many charms.

  “While you were sleeping, I was thinking: you could have slowed your bike down with a parachute,” Amp said.

  I shot him a look. “Oh, you think I carry a parachute in my school backpack?”

  “You should have had a backup system,” Amp informed me. “It’s called redundancy. If the first system fails, you have a backup at the ready to employ.”

  “Listen to this guy,” I said to Olivia. “The alien who drilled the front of his spaceship into my bedroom wall is giving me a lecture about how to stop.”

  “You could have crashed your bike onto a bed,” Amp added. “The kinetic energy of you and your bike would have been absorbed by the mattress.”

  “Good idea,” Olivia said, high-threeing Amp.

  “Really helpful, guys,” I said. “I’ll be sure to ask Principal Luntz to install a cozy set of bedroom furniture for the next time Amp steals my brakes.”

  “I didn’t steal them,” Amp said. “I borrowed them. Without asking.”

  Olivia laughed. “I like the way you think, Ampy.”

  “You guys are making my head hurt worse than my shoulder.” I sighed.

  “Council Note—”

  “Oh, please stop!” I growled.

  He ignored me and continued speaking into his wristband device.

  “Council Note: Boy Earthling seems completely unaware of the existence of kinetic energy, which is merely the energy created as a result of something moving. He does, however, seem very familiar with inertia, which is the tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged. You should see him just lying here!”