King of the Mole People--Rise of the Slugs Read online

  “That boy right there!” he said. “He saved the other students! They were so thankful to be alive that they made him head of the dance committee!”

  “About that—” I started.

  “With Becky in charge, we could count on everything going fine,” said Principal Wiggins. “But with this Underbelly kid, who knows what could happen? That’s why … that’s why…”

  Miss Chips looked up, sensing what was coming. Principal Wiggins faltered. Then forged ahead.

  “That’s why I’m putting you in charge of this Saturday’s Springtime in Paris dance!” he declared. Miss Chips growled like a bear hit with a tranquilizer dart. “You will work alongside Underbelly. You’ll supervise both the decorating and the event itself. The two of you will be in charge…”

  Her gaze intensified. I couldn’t help but wonder if Wiggins was going to get out of this without being buried up to his neck on an anthill.

  “… together,” he croaked, and slumped onto his chair.

  “Paris?” said Miss Chips, which was the only word she said.

  Then she turned her gaze on me. It was already warmed up from being used on the Principal, so it reduced my insides to pudding. Fortunately she must have been late for a nap or an armed conflict or something, because she got up and left the office. I think her laser-gaze skimmed over the bulletin board as she went by, because thumbtacks popped from the cork and papers fell to the floor. Wiggins and I looked at each other with the sweaty stares and heavy breaths of fellow shipwreck survivors clinging to debris on a beach.

  “Principal Wiggins,” I stammered, “about the dance committee…”

  “Don’t worry if you’ve never danced with a girl before, Underbelly.”

  “No, it’s not that—”

  “Your fellow students have honored you by giving you this position. Over Becky Binkey, astonishingly. And frankly, you don’t have the social currency not to accept. Besides, I’ve already given Miss Chips the assignment to work with you.” He sighed. “I’m not going through that again.”

  By the time I got to the classroom there was already a thick layer of disgruntlement in the air. Miss Chips had announced she’d been made supervisor of the dance. And just so there was no doubt how she felt about it, everyone had to write a five-thousand-word report on plate tectonics. Even the Brainers only knew a couple hundred words about this subject at best, so we were expected to just write “plate tectonics” over and over till either we reached five thousand words or our hands had broken and our fingers had fallen off.

  The class was grumbling and looking for someone to take it out on.

  “Blame him,” said Miss Chips, pointing at me.

  And they did.

  Backyard—Tuesday

  Again the sun went down, and again I donned my crown and watched my subterranean cleanup crew bubble from the grave hole for another long night of work.

  Before I’d run off for school that morning I’d given the Moles a picture torn out of a gardening magazine to show them the kind of thing humans liked in a yard.

  Oog and Boogo came out of the hole smiling broadly, telling me to trust them, they’d figured it out, and knew exactly what to do to get the yard looking like the magazine. I quickly checked the back of the page to make sure there wasn’t an ad for wrecking balls on the other side or something. Moles are very literal. But they assured me they knew what photo I wanted.

  While we worked, I took a moment to apologize to Ploogoo for sending him to his Mole lady with flowers the wrong way up.

  “It wouldn’t matter,” said Ploogoo. “For what earthly bouquet could but wilt ’neath the beauty of my sweet, fair Lindoog?”

  “SHHHH!” I hissed to Oog and Boogo as they knocked down a tombstone while trying to tie a hammock to it. Then to Ploogoo, “Hey, what you said there gives me an idea! You should recite her a poem!”

  “Really? You think she’ll like that?” said Ploogoo.

  “Yes, it’s poetry, it’ll work,” I said, again with more confidence than I felt. I had no firsthand proof of the potency of poetry, but I assumed all the greeting card stores I’d seen around stayed in business for a reason.

  Not much rhymes with Lindoog, so I came up with this:

  “Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  Mud is brown,

  And so are you.”

  He asked if I was sure about this, and I said yes, shoving him forward.

  The sweet, fair Lindoog listened to Ploogoo’s poem, and turned and walked away. I shook my head. Ploogoo must have been terrible at reciting poems.

  The Moles worked through the night, and even in the limited light I could see everything around me taking on a sparkly, magical glow. “This is looking great!” I said.

  Which I guess was too much for Captain Bring-down Ploogoo, because it set him off babbling about the giant Slugs again.

  He started telling me how the Bull Slug Ambassador, whose name was Gurge, was putting the pressure on the Slug Ambassador that we knew, whose name was Sputz. I commented that Slug names all sounded like embarrassing body noises. Ploogoo told me the Bull Slugs knew about the deal the Common Slugs made with Croogy to kidnap the old Mole King (King Zog) in exchange for some real estate on the Mole Level, and Ambassador Gurge was asserting that since the Common Slugs kept their part of the bargain, the Moles still owed them big-time.

  “Nobody knows how these new Bull Slugs found out about the deal with Croogy—” said Ploogoo.

  “Ahhh! This is a disaster!” I yelled.

  “Well, it’s troubling, yes, but I think maybe we can talk to the Slugs and—”

  But I wasn’t talking about any Slugs. I was talking about the yard, and my latest, even more massive mistake. As the first rays of light fell across the trees, bushes, and tombstones, they revealed that the Moles had covered everything with luminescent clay. The photo I’d given them was, of course, taken in daylight, so they assumed I wanted the yard to be more well lit. In darkness, luminescent clay has a pleasant glow. In the light, it just looks like clay. Clay that’s the color of … I don’t even know, it was indescribable.

  “King like?” said Oog.

  “King not like!” I said. “It’s the most unattractive color in the history of eyeballs!”

  “Color?” said Oog.

  Turns out that Moles are colorblind. Which makes sense for a group of creatures that live their whole lives underground. And might also explain why reciting a poem about color to a girl Mole would be poorly received.

  End of day two—the yard was covered in upside-down foliage, and caked with clay the color of baby poop excreted from a baby that had eaten nothing but mustard. There, I figured out how to describe it.

  6

  MIDWEEK

  School—Wednesday

  So being in charge of the Moles was going as disastrously as usual. Let’s see how being in charge of the dance committee was going.

  Miss Chips had made it clear she wanted all the decorating she was supposed to be supervising to be finished by Friday, as there was no way she was coming in on Saturday prior to the dance.

  Work was done after class, presumably during a time Miss Chips was usually at home eating marshmallows and watching game shows. Stuck instead at school, she brought a trash bag of marshmallows and a portable TV and set herself up on a folding chair by the door of the gym. She would then glower at me for a full thirty seconds to cauterize a warning on the inside of my skull—a warning I might keep in mind when making any reports to Principal Wiggins about her level of involvement—and then pay no further attention to the proceedings.

  Besides me, the dance committee consisted of the three Binkettes, Marco, Becky, and Pennyworth. Despite having resigned as committee head, Becky stuck around to oversee things and make sure they were not going well. And Pennyworth had joined to prove to Becky that he would have been a far better choice than me, which also entailed making sure things were not going well.

  Pennyworth tried commiserating with Bec
ky about how much I was going to mess everything up, and how Becky was clearly doing a great job that nobody appreciated.

  The Binkettes and Marco were torn. The Binkettes were invested in the dance because it was a social event that underlined their lofty status. And Marco was invested in the dance because he had a new scarf from Milan he wanted to debut. But they were also keen supporters of me failing dramatically. It was a quandary for them.

  Pennyworth took charge of the poster-making and tried to wreck everything by purposely misspelling “dance” on all the posters. But it turned out that “danse” was how you spelled “dance” in French, so it actually worked with the “Springtime in Paris” theme. So he just spilled paint on them instead.

  Then we had to decorate the gym. Except Coach Parker was running a floor hockey practice in there and refused to relinquish any space. Little plastic pucks kept connecting with heads. They said it was accidental, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that was true, since the heads the pucks connected with were pretty much only mine and Pennyworth’s, and Ed and Ted and the Coach kept laughing and yelling “bull’s-eye!”

  I had to hand it to Ed and Ted, their floor hockey skills were pretty sharp.

  The pucks also accurately knocked over cans of springtime pastel paint and tore through streamers we were trying to hang. One got stuck in a big papier-mâché croissant and the whole hockey team bashed it to bits with their sticks, saying they needed to “play it where it lays.”

  One of the Binkettes suggested that, for the “springtime” part of “Springtime in Paris,” we should get loads of leaves and tape them to the walls, but this was shot down as something that would take hundreds of hours to accomplish and divert too much time away from the decorative centerpiece of the event: a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

  The tower was something Becky had suggested while she was still reigning, and she and the Binkettes seemed to like the idea even more now that it could be blamed on someone else if it failed.

  The proposed size of the tower quickly escalated as kids giddy with lack of accountability kept one-upping the dimensions. The groundskeeper—who, like everyone, had a soft spot for Becky—provided a huge pile of metal rods from some old football bleachers, and we began laying them out on the gym floor after the floor hockey was finally done.

  I questioned if it was going to be too tall to stand upright in the gym, and Pennyworth insulted my math skills for not being able to subtract a horizontal number from a vertical number. He looked at Becky and laughed at me. And Becky actually smiled. So apparently I did have some ability to help create romance. I just had to get Ploogoo to insult my math skills in front of Lindoog, and the sparks would fly.

  There were a few hours between the time Miss Chips swatted us with her empty marshmallow garbage bag to get us to leave and the time the sun went down. I might have used this time to catch some sleep, but instead I dragged a bunch of bags to the collection of trees behind the science portable. Magda found me there, filling the bags with leaves.

  I’d been avoiding her because I had the feeling she still wasn’t keen on me using the Moles for manual yard work. I got that idea because she’d been tossing notes on my desk like this:

  “How’s being King of the Dance Committee?” she asked.

  I said it was terrible, because just like I told her, the weirdness was causing nothing but catastrophe.

  “Look at all these welts on my head from floor hockey pucks!” I yelled.

  She said there was no reason to blame any new influx of weirdness, as I’d been getting injured by random objects all year long. I asked her to give me ten examples, and she listed them quickly. I asked for ten more.

  “Ever stop to think it’s just ’cause you’re a doofus?” she said.

  “I am not!” I said, as my rake caught on a trash bag and ripped it, spilling leaves back onto the ground. “See? One minute it’s a ripped trash bag, and the next it’ll be the destruction of everything!”

  “You’re just using this as an excuse because you don’t want to be King anymore.”

  “I never wanted to be King!” I said. “Because I’m bad at it!”

  “You’re not that bad at it. Other than maybe you don’t know when to keep your mouth shut,” she said. “Speaking of which, have the Moles mentioned the new Slugs that you blabbed to? I wonder if they found out there were humans in their egg chamber?”

  Ugh, right, that egg Pennyworth took. It’s not like I wasn’t concerned about that. I was. But with all those eggs down there, could the Slugs have missed just one? Once all this stuff with the house and dance and Moles was over, I’d make a point of finding it and taking it back underground. Even though I’d be completely finished with weirdness by then, I’d still do it. Because I’m that nice a guy. I wondered where Pennyworth stashed it. Maybe in the science portable I was standing next to. I’d check there next week.

  “I don’t have time for any below-ground affairs,” I said. “News crews are coming Friday morning to film my house. Before then I’ve got to repair the carnage done by colorblind landscapers, create Paris in a gym with a committee bent on my destruction, and try to keep Miss Chips’s eyes from boring a hole into my skull. But just a few more days and then I’ll be out! Done! Never in charge of anything again!”

  “And you’re doing all this,” said Magda, “being irresponsible with your authority, putting the Moles in danger of being seen, trying to shirk the honor bestowed on you by a group that calls you friend … all because a dead bird fell out of the sky?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “That, and avoiding looking weird. Don’t think I’m okay with everyone thinking I’m a weirdo just because I accepted being seen with you.”

  Magda’s ping-pong eyes narrowed to slits.

  “One day,” she said, “when you’re grown up and you’re doing some boring job surrounded by people who jog on treadmills and file their taxes and stare at computers all day, you’ll realize this was the most amazing experience that was ever offered to you. And you squandered it.”

  The rake ripped the bag again. I turned to show her how un-amazing this experience was, but she’d already walked away.

  Backyard—Wednesday

  The Binkettes’ idea of taping leaves onto things had stuck in my head. Even better than on walls, it could be used on trees. Getting an entire gym covered in leaves using only a handful of surly, uncooperative dance committee members? Never gonna happen. But getting a yardful of dead trees covered using a large group of underground dwellers ready to do your bidding? Game on.

  I had ten bags of leaves waiting for them when they spilled from the grave hole that night, and I set them to work scrubbing off clay and taping leaves.

  I saw Ploogoo approaching, and hoped he didn’t want any more tips on impressing girls, because I was out. But instead he had his own brainwave. “What about compliments?” he asked. “Do girls like receiving those?”

  I shrugged. But I told him he might as well give it a try. Looking at Lindoog, I wondered what stood out about her that he could compliment. There was that big horn sticking out of her forehead. I told him to try complimenting that, see what it did.

  Well, it didn’t do much, other than cause her to storm away from him again. I was realizing my complete lack of interaction with girls all my life had left me with a pretty gaping hole in my understanding about them.

  The night wore on, filled with the sounds of my yawns and of Moles taping leaves and digging and scrubbing and not even really stepping on rakes all that much. The eastern sky began to brighten, and I flinched in anticipation of what latest catastrophe would soon be revealed.

  But to my astonishment … things looked good! The clay was gone, and fresh leaves rustled on every tree and bush. Boogo had dug a pond and lined it with stones. Oog had created a natural canopy over the hammock. The unfillable open grave was camouflaged with bushes. The pathway wrapped through the grounds in the shape of the Celtic symbol of serenity. And there wasn’t a dead bat to be found.
>
  “King like?” asked Oog.

  “King love!” I said excitedly. “King so happy!”

  But that was Ploogoo’s cue to commence talking about the Slugs again. He started by telling me about the King of the Bull Slugs, who was apparently huge.

  “Much bigger than the King of the Common Slugs,” he said.

  This was relevant because Slug Kings earned their crown during a ritual called “The Great Slugging,” where all the Slugs pile on top of each other and crush the ones below them. Hugeness is a clear advantage in this selection process.

  “The Bull Slugs aren’t just thicker and slimier,” said Ploogoo. “They’re more aggressive too. They want to merge with the Common Slugs and then confront us about the Croogy deal. They’re demanding to speak with you, King.”

  How many times did I have to tell them that I wasn’t going back down there, that I was abdicating being King?

  “I’m starting to have strong suspicions that you guys never took my one-month time limit to find a replacement seriously!” I declared.

  “Of course we not take it seriously,” said Oog. “Our calendar only two rocks piled on top of each other. But also, you best King! We love you! Who else we get?”

  I looked Ploogoo up and down. I couldn’t help but feel my efforts to help him win Lindoog’s affection and boost his confidence had been unsuccessful. The only improvement I could see was that he’d at least stopped blowing his nose on the back of his hand.

  I pointed at him anyway because I didn’t have anywhere else to point, and everyone turned to look behind him, including Ploogoo, before realizing who I meant.

  “Me?” said Ploogoo, dabbing tears with the scarf. “Nobody would rumble for me during a Crown Rumble.” The Moles who were filing past into the bushes that led back down into the grave hole looked over and shook their heads to indicate this was true. One made a raspberry sound.