Alien in My Pocket #3 Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Shipwrecked

  Chapter 2: Listen to This

  Chapter 3: Let’s Talk

  Chapter 4: Pet Trap

  Chapter 5: Spaced-out Radio

  Chapter 6: Attack of the Amp!

  Chapter 7: Spider Fallout

  Chapter 8: The Drive

  Chapter 9: No Promises

  Chapter 10: Up and At ’Em

  Chapter 11: Get Ready, Get Set, Panic!

  Chapter 12: Attention, Earth

  Chapter 13: The Road Home

  Chapter 14: Get Up for It

  Chapter 15: Post-disaster Review

  Chapter 16: No Jury, No Trial

  Try It Yourself: Building Your Own Radio

  Excerpt from Alien in My Pocket #4: On Impact!

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  01

  Shipwrecked

  I bet when you imagine somebody who has been shipwrecked, you think of a really skinny guy with a scraggly beard, eating bananas on a tiny island.

  I know I would have before Amp arrived.

  Amp is the alien who got shipwrecked in my room.

  I kid you not.

  Amp crash-landed on planet Earth through my bedroom window. His spaceship smashed my bedroom wall and landed on my bed. I had to cover the blackened dent in my wall with a baseball poster so my mom didn’t see it. I still haven’t really explained the black stains on my sheets.

  But those are the least of my problems. Now I have a blue alien not much bigger than my fist secretly living in my room. Imagine trying to keep that a secret! Not easy, especially since instead of bananas, my stranded traveler only eats Ritz crackers and SweeTarts. Seriously, there’s only so many rolls of SweeTarts a kid can buy without people starting to get suspicious!

  You might think living with your own little alien dude is fascinating and incredible and amazing—but you’d be wrong. It’s like sharing your room with an annoying little brother. A little, blue, three-fingered brother from another planet. I already have a little brother from this planet. And trust me, one little brother is more than enough.

  “Did you fart?” my alien houseguest asked, interrupting my homework—again.

  “Whoever smelt it dealt it,” I mumbled, not looking up from my math homework.

  “How dare you?” Amp replied in his high-pitched voice. “You know my body uses energy much too efficiently to require the release of leftover gases.”

  “Oh, come on,” I groaned.

  “I am offended, Zack. I’m simply noting that suddenly your room smells funny.”

  “You’re always floating air biscuits and then pointing fingers.”

  “What do you mean by ‘air biscuits’?”

  “Oh, you know. A barking spider. A cheese squeeze. A thunder muffin. A seat tweet.”

  “I can honestly say I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  I put down my pencil and turned to look at him. “I am saying you release cloud monkeys all the time then act all mystified as to why it smells like burning tires in here. Face it, you fluff quite frequently because of that crummy diet of yours.”

  “I am still puzzled as to why my affection for Ritz crackers and SweeTarts troubles you so much.”

  “It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if you didn’t walk around like a crop duster, leaving a trail of toxic alien farts behind you.”

  Amp was quiet for a second. He sat down on the alarm clock next to my bed and squirmed. I think he was trying to give me some alien stinkeye, but it just made him look even more gassy. “You can’t prove a thing.”

  I rolled my eyes and turned back to my word problems. “Silent but deadly.” I sighed.

  “I heard that.”

  “Good,” I whispered. “You little fart factory.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  The walkie-talkie next to my math book suddenly crackled to life. “Earth One, this is Earth Two. Over.”

  Olivia.

  Olivia is my best friend and next-door neighbor, and she’s the only other person on the planet who knows about my secret roommate.

  I picked up the walkie-talkie and pushed the Talk button. “This is Earth One. Read you loud and clear. What’s up? Over.”

  I stared at the walkie-talkie, waiting.

  “I’m coming over. Over.”

  “Over? Oh, roger. Over,” I said awkwardly.

  “What?” Olivia responded after a few seconds. “I’ve got SweeTarts. Over.”

  “Oh, goodie, dinner,” Amp said from behind me.

  “You mean SweetFarts? Over.”

  “Funny. Over.”

  Then I heard the doorbell ring downstairs.

  It was time for our daily meeting about getting Amp back home. We hadn’t met in three days, though, so our daily meeting might need a new name.

  02

  Listen to This

  “It smells like the devil burped in here.”

  Olivia had just shut the door of my room. She pulled two rolls of SweeTarts out of her pocket and tossed them to Amp, who was still sitting on my alarm clock.

  “It smells like that because he keeps eating those fart pills,” I said, still hunched over my math homework. “Hey, did you get the one about the train leaving San Francisco at eight p.m.?” I asked, turning around in my chair.

  Olivia is in my class at Reed School. Schoolwork isn’t difficult for her. Olivia just sort of knows stuff. She usually finishes her math homework while everyone else is packing up to leave for the day. She’d be a real brain if she weren’t so weird and didn’t talk so much.

  “Forty-eight miles an hour is the answer,” she said, watching Amp flip SweeTarts into his mouth.

  “Forty-eight?” I croaked. “I have five hundred forty-four!”

  “How is that possible?” She laughed, shaking her head at me. “What train travels that fast, Whacky Zacky?”

  “Maybe those Japanese bullet trains. I saw them on TV.”

  “They don’t go that fast,” she corrected me. “Two hundred miles an hour, tops.”

  “We have trainlike vehicles back on Erde,” Amp said, once again bragging about how great things were on his planet. “They travel about as fast as sound travels here.”

  “I’ve told you before about talking with your mouth full,” I grumbled, turning back to my incorrect math problem. “You may have fast trains on Erde, but we have something called manners here on this planet.”

  “Has he been this grumpy the whole time?” Olivia asked Amp.

  “Since he got home. Surprisingly, math makes him angry.”

  Honestly, all our meetings about fixing Amp’s busted spaceship, getting him off this planet, and returning my life to normal went like this. What was the point of meeting if we never accomplished anything except pointing out all the things I do wrong? I was so not the problem.

  There was a knock on my bedroom door. Olivia quickly moved to block the view of Amp from the doorway.

  She always did this, even though Amp could easily make himself invisible to someone. He uses one of his Jedi mind tricks. He basically erases your memory of seeing him as you see him, so you instantly forget you’re seeing him while you’re looking at him.

  I know, it sounds complicated. You get used to it. But Olivia always forgets he can do that.

  The door clicked open and my little brother poked his head in.

  “I heard you have SweeTarts,” he said. “I want some.”

  “Go away, Taylor,” I groaned from my desk. “We’re busy.”

  Olivia reached into her pocket and tossed Taylor a roll of SweeTarts. He intentionally missed the catch so he could step all the
way into my room. “Hey, what are you guys doing?” he asked, looking around. “It smells like burning toothpaste in here.”

  Taylor knew something was up. He knew I was hiding a secret, and he’d dedicated his life to figuring out what it was. He’d even built an army of spy robots to help him. Fortunately, I’d destroyed most of them when I caught them in my room.

  My parents are convinced Taylor is some kind of genius. He is only in the first grade and building robots. But I don’t care. I think he’s only a genius at annoying me.

  I got up and pushed him out of my room. “Go play with your robots, you Nosy Nelly.” I closed the door on him and leaned my back against it.

  “But I want to hang out with you guys,” he said from the other side of the door.

  “Buzz off!” I shouted. I heard him walk down the squeaky hallway.

  Olivia sat up on my bed. She had an odd look on her face. It was almost white, like she’d seen a ghost.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I ask. “Is Amp’s gas cloud getting to you?”

  “How did he know I had SweeTarts? I didn’t tell him, and you didn’t tell him, so how did he know?”

  The three of us stared at each other.

  Without looking down, Olivia unclipped the walkie-talkie from her pocket. She held it up and stared at it. “That little sneak is listening in on our walkie-talkie conversations.”

  “What a clever idea,” Amp whispered.

  I looked at them both. I was pretty sure steam was coming out of my ears. “A clever idea that the little worm is gonna pay for.”

  03

  Let’s Talk

  As Amp studied the walkie-talkie on my desk, Olivia and I discussed ways to get back at Taylor.

  Olivia lives with her grandfather in the house next to ours. He has a line he always says: “Turnabout is fair play.” I always just thought he was weird, but for the first time, I understood what he meant. If Taylor was going to listen in on our conversations, we were going to make sure he heard what we wanted him to hear.

  “We could have walkie-talkie conversations that convince Taylor that an evil spirit named Amp has taken over your body,” Olivia suggested. “You could pretend to have a split personality.”

  “Or that I have an evil, secret twin brother who lives under my bed,” I said. “So at breakfast he won’t know if he’s sitting across from me or my evil twin.”

  “What would your twin’s name be?” Olivia asked. “Amp simply won’t do.”

  “How about Herm?” I suggested.

  “Herm is so good,” she agreed. “Perfect.”

  We were both watching Amp check out my walkie-talkie. He often studied human technology with great interest; it seemed to amuse him half the time and puzzle him the other half.

  He stroked his chin and walked around the thing like it was the most fascinating thing ever made on this planet.

  “Maybe my twin’s name could be Cooper,” I said.

  “That’s a terrible name. Everyone would call him Pooper,” she told me.

  “Ah, man, I always liked that name.”

  “Wait, wait. Maybe we could say Amp is your secret pet tarantula!” Olivia said, clapping with excitement. “Taylor hates spiders.”

  “They make him turn as white as cream cheese,” I agreed.

  “Maybe it’s one of those goliath bird-eater tarantulas from South America.”

  “That I ordered off the internet with six months of my allowance money!”

  “Yeah! Oh, he’ll look it up on the internet and freak out completely. That tarantula is seriously the size of your catcher’s mitt.”

  “That’ll serve him right,” I said, nodding slowly as the plan took shape in my head. “And my tarantula will go missing. I won’t be able to find him.”

  Olivia laughed. “You could say on the walkie-talkie that you think it may have escaped into Taylor’s room, but you’re afraid to tell him or your parents. Wait till he hears that. Don’t you wish you could see his face?”

  We high-fived. It was a great plan.

  But, as always happened in our meetings, we had not moved the ball forward one inch in terms of helping Amp repair his space-and-time-skipping ship.

  I noticed Amp suddenly turn his back to us and speak in a quiet voice into the contraption he wore on his wrist.

  “Note to Erdian Council: Humans utilize simple two-way radio transceivers they call walkie-talkies. They appear to utilize a range of between four and five hundred megahertz on what they call the ultrahigh frequency spectrum, or UHF for short.”

  “Amp, you’re being rude,” I said. “We can totally hear you.” Taking verbal notes for his alien bosses on that thing was just one of his many annoying habits.

  Amp continued:

  “Primitive but effective construction. Limited range and poor battery life. But efficient. One of the earthlings’ better devices—”

  “I’m going to give you to my brother if you don’t stop that creepy mumbling,” I growled at him.

  Amp turned back to face us, paused, and cleared his throat. “I have an idea that I’d like to share,” he announced.

  “No, we like the missing giant tarantula idea,” Olivia said.

  “It’s pretty solid,” I agreed. “You’re not gonna top that one, blue man.”

  “This isn’t about your childish plan for tricking Taylor,” he said, shaking his head at us.

  “Oh,” Olivia and I said at the same time.

  “Jinx,” she said, and punched me in the arm a lot harder than you would think a girl could punch your arm.

  “Ow!” I said, moving away from Olivia. I rubbed my arm. “What idea are you talking about then, Amp?”

  “I am talking about forgetting about fixing my ship.”

  “What?” Olivia and I both said in unison.

  Before I could move farther away, she punched me again in the same spot she had just seconds ago. “Jinx again!” she screamed.

  “Stop it, Olivia!” I shouted, jumping up. “Never mess with a catcher’s throwing arm. This is my ticket to the big leagues.”

  “Sorry,” Olivia said with a giggle. She turned to the alien invader. “Ampy, what do you mean about not fixing your ship? Are you giving up?”

  “You’re not quitting!” I yelped. “If you don’t call off the attack, your people are going to show up here and my life will never return to normal. You can’t throw in the towel now!”

  “I don’t even have a towel,” he said, looking around. He considered both of us like we had lost our minds. “I am talking about building a special kind of radio. A quantum radio—think of it as a supersized walkie-talkie—so that I can radio Erde from here and call off the invasion.”

  We were all quiet for a moment.

  “Why didn’t you think of this before?” I asked.

  “My radio was damaged in the crash, but I may be able to use your walkie-talkie to work around it.”

  “Hey, we can still do the tarantula thing, right?” Olivia asked.

  Amp sighed and shrugged his tiny shoulders. “I don’t see why not.”

  Olivia held up her hand for another high five, but I wasn’t able to move my arm yet.

  04

  Pet Trap

  Olivia ate dinner at my house that night.

  She was doing that more and more often lately. Partly because her grandpa returned late when he went fishing, but really because my mom loved having Olivia over.

  Olivia was the daughter she never had.

  “Do you need more milk, sweetie?” Mom cooed in a soft, caring voice she never used on me.

  “Oh, no thanks, Mrs. McGee, I’ve barely started drinking the one you already poured,” Olivia answered.

  “Call me Christine, dear,” Mom gushed.

  “Oh, okay . . . Christine,” Olivia replied, obviously feeling uncomfortable.

  “I could use some more milk, Christine,” I said hopefully.

  “It’s in the fridge, dear,” Mom answered, not looking up from the roll she was butt
ering.

  We never had rolls with dinner unless Olivia was eating over.

  “What do you guys do in there all day?” Taylor asked. He looked up from the steak he was trying to cut with an electric knife he had recently built.

  It also seemed like we never had steak for dinner unless Olivia was eating over.

  “We do homework,” I said, shuffling to the fridge for more milk.

  “Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?” Taylor asked.

  “Taylor!” Mom cried.

  “Enough of that,” Dad said, looking sharply at Taylor, a piece of juicy steak hanging from his fork.

  Olivia broke the awkward silence with a big laugh. I knew it was not her real laugh, but it fooled all of them. “Of course not, silly,” she said. “We talk about homework, baseball, and the Young Volunteers.”

  “I want to be in the Young Volunteers, too,” Taylor said.

  “No, you don’t,” Olivia said. “Trust me.”

  “You have to be in the third grade at least,” I said. “And I’m only doing it because Principal Luntz is making me. Which is probably illegal when you think about it.”

  “Yeah,” Olivia agreed, pointing at me with her fork. “You’re right, Zackaroni. I bet that club breaks forty different child labor laws.”

  “It’s not illegal,” Dad said, swirling his mashed potatoes with his fork.

  “Why did the principal make you join the Young Volunteers again?” Taylor asked, looking around suspiciously.

  “It involved a large slingshot and water balloons filled with spoiled milk,” Olivia bragged, popping a piece of roll in her mouth.

  “That unfortunate incident caused me a lot of trouble,” Dad said, raising his eyebrows at Olivia.

  “We had no idea Principal Luntz would be in the parking lot,” I cut in.

  “We actually knocked his glasses off,” Olivia said happily.

  “And broke them,” Mom added quietly.

  “Wow,” Taylor said. “Why hasn’t anybody told me this story before?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing we like to brag about,” Dad said.

  “He was more mad that the milk smelled terrible than that his glasses were broken,” Olivia added.