Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (7 page)

Principal Bubb crushed the paper in her talons, yet—due to the notice being printed on special uncrumpleable
paper—it infuriatingly smoothed back to its original, mocking state.

You would think that capturing Milton Fauster would count for
something, the principal seethed to herself.
Sure, I was capturing him because he escaped …
twice.
But at least I was showing initiative
.

Principal Bubb scooped up several puzzling financial statements that had come to her attention. Apparently, a flux of mysterious funds had been funneled to Fibble and the Furafter. Though the untraceable transactions had bypassed her authority due to her current probation—and the fact that the Furafter was not her purview—the Department of Unendurable Redundancy, Bureaucracy, and Redundancy had sent her multiple copies, in triplicate, several times over.

She would normally find this only mildly irritating, but considering that not only had P. T. Barnum, Fibble’s vice principal, failed to return any of her calls,
but
Milton Fauster—the procedural snag at which her career had begun to unravel—had also just been transferred there, she was a touch concerned.

Plus, Satan had seemed so distracted lately, so immersed in the devilish details of his own diversions that he had left much of the Netherworld to its own devices—
never
a good idea considering some of the nefarious devices that could be found down here.

Principal Bubb sighed, leaned back in her chair, and put her hooves up on her desk. She stared up at a patch
of sick some child had projectile vomited on the ceiling long ago.

Many of the devil’s decrees were monkey business as usual, like cutting corners by downgrading Heck’s toilet paper quality, she thought, squirming in her chair. But a few of his actions didn’t seem like him at all, such as pouring money into some new TV network—as if any world, whether under, above, or in between,
needed
another TV network. It would be one thing if h-e-double-hockey-sticks was showing a profit, but the Netherworld was in the red—a
deep
red hemorrhaging of funds impossible to ignore even in this predominantly red place. Shifting his focus to some vanity project was inexcusable.

Instead of wasting my afterlife mooning over the devil, I should be looking out for myself
, the principal seethed as she uncrossed her haunches.

Something rapped upon the principal’s door. She rose from her chair.

“What is it?” she called out.

The door to her lair opened.

“Excuse me, Principal Bubb,” a thin, ropy demon resembling a twisted pepperoni stick said, peering inside the not-so-secret lair. “It’s time for your Swedish Mass Age treatment—oww!!”

Cerberus had sunk all three sets of his mercilessly sharp teeth into the demon guard’s leg before bolting past him into the hallway.

“Cerberus!” Bea “Elsa” Bubb shrieked. “My widdle boopsy bottom! Come back!”

For perhaps the first time in his monstrous life, the three-headed dog failed to heed his master. His claws scrabbled along the slick floor of the hallways, shooting sparks behind him.

“Don’t just stand there, you ridiculous, once-living rawhide!” the principal screeched at the demon guard. “Go wave yourself in front of my schmoopy cuddle snugglet and get him back this instant!”

The demonic meat-stick-of-a-man bowed and trundled after Cerberus, who, at this point, was just a fuzzy, panting, clattering blur. Demons, teachers, and assorted dead boys and girls dove out of the creature’s determined way.

Principal Bubb darted out of her office and hoofed it into the hallway.

“Oh my badness!” she gasped. “My li’l wuv devil! I
knew
I shouldn’t have switched to that new Impurina Hound Chow!”

The corridor was a carnival of confusion.

“Calling all demon guards!” the principal bellowed as an oily tear seeped out of her pus-yellow goat eye. “Drop what you are pretending to be doing at once and bring me back my
precious moopie lumkin chunkalunks
!”

But it was too late. Cerberus was running like a wingless bat out of Heck.

“DO YOU KNOW
why you cry when you cut an onion?” Colby asked in that way that isn’t a question, more like an announcement that your time is about to be hijacked at tongue-point.

Marlo cinched the telephone-wire suspenders that held up her flaming pants. They weren’t literally on fire like those of her vice principal—fortunately, as she never
did
have the legs for hot pants, now even less so as her brother—but emblazoned with lapping flames poorly embroidered with red and orange thread.

“No, but I have a feeling I’m about to find out,” she said as they walked to their first class.

“They used to think it was because of some chemical in the onions,” Colby said as he scratched at his lice-infested shirt. “But … it’s really because you—everybody—craves
onions right when they are about to cry.”

Marlo smirked despite herself.

“Well, I’m about to cry from boredom … does that count?”

She noticed that, right after Colby told a whopper of a lie, he stopped scratching.
The little white lice are hungry
, Barnum had said,
and want to be fed with fibs
. Marlo fumbled for her brother’s puked-up pendant that she kept in her pocket. For whatever reason, it seemed to keep the little white lice comatose, like some kind of repellant.

The class bell tolled as Marlo and Colby stepped into a room resounding with crazy drumming and chanting. There, in front of a circle of students with conga drums for desks, were three old men wearing neckties and grass skirts. Marlo recognized Mr. Nixon but didn’t recognize the other two men, though they all wore a similar expression of assumed importance and, unfortunately, not much else.

“Ah, the late, hardly great Mr. Fauster and some anonymous shifty-eyed ragamuffin,” Mr. Nixon replied with a deep rattle. “To your drums … 
if it’s not too much trouble.
”

Marlo brushed past the chalkboard by the door, which—scrawled across it in fancy cursive letters—read: “Voodoo Economics, taught by dead presidents Fillmore and Pierce with special guest Mr. Nixon.”

Marlo made her way to an empty drum in the back
of the room. Next to it, a boy was stooped over, scratching his calf.

“Excuse me, Itchy McScab, but is this drum taken?” Marlo asked the boy’s back.

With deep brown eyes daubed onto a stark white canvas of a face, the boy looked up at Marlo with sullen charisma.

“Zane!” Marlo yelped girlishly.

Zane Covington, the cool British exchange student she had met back in Rapacia! While the particulars of Marlo’s Infernship were still just vague smears finger-painted across her memory, Zane’s brief appearance had had a profound effect upon her psyche. Even in his flame-print pants and writhing, lice-encrusted shirt, he was still a “smashing bloke.”

Impulsively, Marlo bent down to give him a hug. Zane recoiled.

“Whoa, mate,” he replied with a look of sour shock. “I’m a Brit. We don’t do that.”

As the boys on either side of Zane snickered, the full awfulness of her situation drizzled foully down upon Marlo, as if incontinent pigeons had suddenly flocked overhead.

I’m Milton
, she thought sadly.
I’m finally next to a boy that doesn’t make me want to dry heave, and I’m my brother. My skinny, gross
boy
of a brother
.

Marlo tried to pull herself together.

“I, um, am Milton,” Marlo managed as she sat down
behind the conga drum. “You saved me from becoming a big gold statue back in Mallvana—you know, the Grab-bit’s big ceremony?—when King Midas tried to grab me … he actually grabbed this big sort of centipede demon guard thing—yuck, huh?!—that had grabbed
me
, really, but …”

Zane’s eyes became faraway, as if his mind had booked a flight to an exotic locale. Marlo sighed.

“I’m Marlo’s brother … 
Marlo Fauster.
”

Zane’s eyes returned home, suddenly, from their short vacation, not even taking time to flip through the mail.

“Marlo?” he said in his faintly posh accent. Zane examined Milton’s face. “Yeah, I suppose there
is
a resemblance.”

Marlo shut her eyes.

I do
not
look like my hideous, mutant, goody-goody, sci-fi convention–going, comic book–collecting geek of a brother
! Marlo screamed in her head.

“Have you heard from her?” Zane asked. Marlo was filled with a sort of full-body nausea. It was weird. She was queasy all over but didn’t want it to go away. It was like being on a roller coaster that only went down.

“Not in a while,” Marlo replied, opening her eyes. “But last time I saw her, she seemed great. And she looked really good, too! You know … for a sister …”

Suddenly, someone thwacked Marlo’s drum, nearly causing her to jump out of her brother’s skin.

“Mr. Fauster,” the overweight, piggish-looking man said as he leaned into Marlo. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

Marlo looked the shirtless geezer up and down.

“No, but let me guess,” she replied crisply. “You used to be really important, or so you thought, and—in the end—that didn’t really matter. Now you’re down here in a grass skirt with two other bygone bozos forced to deal with brats like me—a fate you can’t stand, but there you go. You were famous, though no one here knows who you are, and—to you—I’m nothing, but here we are in the same room. It’s kind of funny, but no one is laughing.”

The man’s torso flushed crimson with rage.

“I’m Millard Fillmore,” he hissed, “the thirteenth president of the United States of America!”

“That’s what I meant,” Marlo said, sharing a sideways smirk with Zane.

Mr. Fillmore lunged at Marlo across the drum, before being restrained by a skinny, nervous old man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair.

“Millard,” the man said in a quavering voice. “You know what Principal Bubb said about strangling students.”

Mr. Fillmore composed himself as much as a half-naked senior citizen can.

“Yes, Franklin, that it should never be done during class. What we do on our own time is our own business.”

“
Benjamin
Franklin?” Colby said, peeking through a gap in his hair. “Like the guy that discovered kites?”

Mr. Nixon smacked his drum impatiently. “Franklin
Pierce,
” he clarified. “The fourteenth president of the United States, and can we all please get back to the subject at hand?” he said, his jowls hula dancing with outrage as he and the other two teachers trudged back to the chalkboard.

Zane leaned in close to Marlo.

“You’ve got your sister’s nerve,” he whispered.

Marlo slid back in her chair with a dopey grin smeared across her brother’s dopey face.

“You don’t know the half of it,” she murmured.

Mr. Nixon scratched a series of short, seemingly contradictory phrases on the chalkboard: “Spending saves money. Tax cuts increase tax revenue. More for the rich means more for the poor. Increased supply equals increased demand.”

He beamed at the words on the board.

“That’s our lesson, in a nutshell,” he said, the ex-president’s face threatening to slide into his grinning mouth. “Therein lies the beauty of Voodoo Economics, its simplicity and eerie ability to solve every financial problem at once.”

The African American boy with the ski beanie raised his hand. Mr. Fillmore glanced down at the student roster on the teachers’ desk.

“Yes, Mr.… Cummings?”

“Yeah,
Darnell Cummings,
” the boy said as he folded his arms and sat back in his chair. “I used to work after school as a janitor at MIT and had a gift for math, despite my blue-collar roots. But achieving my dream of being a math wiz meant turning my back on my working-class neighbor and best friend—”

“Sounds like something out of a movie,” Mr. Nixon said dubiously. “Your point?”

“My point,” Darnell continued, “is that nothing on the chalkboard makes any sense.”

Mr. Nixon pounded his fists on his drum.

“That’s because it’s magic!” he shrieked. “That voodoo that we do that’s so swell! It’s not supposed to make
sense …
it’s supposed to make
dollars
! Lots of them!”

Mr. Pierce hiked up the sagging grass skirt that kept drifting below his blinding white belly.

“Maybe if they saw it in action, Mr. Nixon,” he offered.

“Of course,” Mr. Nixon said as he turned to erase the chalkboard. “Let’s start with a clean slate.” He stooped down to retrieve a piece of fallen chalk.

“And no more wisecracks,” Mr. Nixon said, giving the students an entirely new and unwelcome view of the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

He scratched the words “trickle down” on the chalkboard.

Mr. Pierce let loose a salvo of conga slaps. “Now,
students, chant after us,” he hollered.
“Trickle down to make profits go up! Shine the crown to fill the beggar’s cup!”

As the students apathetically smacked their drums and mumbled along with the three half-naked politicians, the PA speakers in the classroom’s ceiling squealed and squawked.