This Book Is Not Good For You (2 page)

Ka-chew!”

Max-Ernest sneezed so violently his spiky hair quivered for a full five seconds after he was done.

“Hey, did you notice—did I blink?”

He looked down at his friend Cassandra, who was crouched next to him, her pointy ears sticking out above her long braids.

“I read that every time you sneeze, you blink. So I always try to see if I can keep my eyes open.”

“Sorry, wasn’t looking…,” Cass muttered.

She had long ago learned to ignore half of what Max-Ernest said. A necessary survival skill if you were going to be best friends with the most talkative boy in town.

“Now what do soup mix and pest control have to do with each other…?”

She was trying to read words scrawled on a cardboard box, but most had been crossed out:

PLUMBING EQUIPMENT

TEDDY BEARS AND TOY MICE

Catchers mitt and opera glasses

Dried flowers, flies for fly fishing, dried flies (real)

PARKING TICKETS

Canned tuna/ soup mix/ pest control

?

“Uh-oh, I think I have to—ka-chew!” Max-Ernest sneezed again. “It’s the dust mites, I’m allergic—”

Cass pushed the box aside—it wasn’t the one she was looking for—and stood up. Suddenly, she was a good half foot taller than her companion.

“Oh right, how could I forget a single one of your hundred allergies?”

“What do you mean? There’s only sixty-three—that I know of,” Max-Ernest corrected, not picking up on her sarcasm. “Let’s see, there’s wheat, walnuts, peanuts, pecans, strawberries, shellfish… oh, and chocolate, of course!”

“C’mon,” said Cass, moving on to a box behind the one she’d just been looking at. “Are you going to help me find this thing or what?”

It was summertime and Cass was working afternoons at her grandfathers’ antiques store:

THE FIRE SALE

EVERYTHING YOU EVER NEVER WANTED!

as it was identified on the front door.

As readers of certain unmentionable books will recall, the store was housed on the bottom floor of an old redbrick fire station. Cass’s grandfathers, Larry and Wayne, lived upstairs, and every day they crammed their store with more and more stuff. Last year, Cass remembered, the store had already seemed like a maze, but at least there’d been enough space to walk between the shelves. Now you had to climb over piles of junk just to get from one part of the room to another.

Cass had told her mother that she was working at the Fire Sale to save money for a new bicycle, but that wasn’t exactly true. It wasn’t her only reason for working anyway.

In fact, she had an ulterior motive.

She was looking for a box. A special box she knew to be somewhere in her grandfathers’ store. And considering there were at least a thousand boxes in the store, not to mention all the things that were unboxed, she figured she would need all summer to find the one she was looking for.

Today, her grandfathers had taken their dog, Sebastian, to the vet, and Cass was taking advantage of the time to redouble her search. Max-Ernest had graciously agreed to assist.

Or more precisely, had reluctantly agreed to keep her company.

He was used to his survivalist friend’s quixotic quests, whether she was searching for toxic waste under the school yard or killer mold under the cafeteria sink. * But this particular search, he felt, was particularly hopeless.

“What makes you think the box is still here?” he asked, not moving from his perch on top of a pile of old encyclopedias.

“You know my grandfathers—they never throw anything away.” She closed up the next box and moved on to another.

Max-Ernest looked around the store and shook his head. “I think they have an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s clinical.”

Cass bristled. She loved her grandfathers and couldn’t stand anyone criticizing them—except possibly herself. “Does everybody have to have a condition? Can’t they just like stuff?”

“So why can’t you just ask them where it is?”

“Are you crazy? They’d tell my mom for sure.”

“But we don’t even know what it looks like. This whole thing doesn’t make any sense—”

“I know it says, ‘Handle With Care.’ And there’s a hole cut in the cardboard.”

“Like if you were carrying a cat?”

“Max-Ernest!”

“OK, OK.”

Max-Ernest wasn’t very good at feelings, whether his own or anybody else’s. But he noticed that Cass’s ears—always a reliable emotional thermometer—were turning bright red.

The box was obviously a sensitive subject.

Indeed, it had been less than six months since Cass had discovered her mother’s secret:

That her mother had not given birth to her.

That she was adopted.

That she was a “foundling,” as her grandfathers put it.

That Cassandra wasn’t even her real name. *

The story went like this:

SPECIAL DELIVERY

The Arrival of Baby Cassandra

A not-so-long-ish time ago in a place not-so-farish away, there lived two not-so-very-old-ish men.

These two men loved collecting things so much that their home filled to the brim with odds and ends and this and that and a lot of bric-a-brac, too.

Knowing the men’s acquisitive habits, the neighboring townsfolk were always leaving boxes on their doorstep. Their home was the home of last resort.

Usually, the boxes contained broken musical instruments or mismatched china or outgrown clothing.

Objects. Things. Stuff.

One fateful day, however, the men opened a box on their doorstep and discovered something altogether different. Instead of baby clothing, they found a baby.

An actual. Living. Breathing. Baby.

The men didn’t know what to do. Of course, of all things in the world, a baby is the one thing most people would want to keep. But as tenderhearted as these men were, they knew that their home was a difficult and dangerous place to raise a child. There were far too many things to pull and poke and break and burn and rip and ruin.

Luckily, a friend was visiting at the time. This friend, a very smart and successful but also very lonely woman, had just been telling them how very, very much she wanted a baby of her own. They decided that the baby was meant to be hers.

The friend was Mel, short for Melanie, the woman who would become Cass’s mother. That same day, the two men, a certain Larry and a certain Wayne, declared themselves Cass’s grandfathers.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Almost.

When Cass first learned the truth about her origins, she’d been inclined to forgive her mother for not telling her sooner. She knew her mother hadn’t wanted even the littlest thing to come between them. And the fact that Cass was adopted was a pretty big thing.

But as the weeks wore on, instead of softening, Cass’s feelings had grown increasingly hard. For most of her life, as the child of a single mom, Cass had wondered who her father was. Now she had to wonder who her mother was as well?

The worst part was that her mother didn’t seem to have any sympathy for Cass wanting to know who her parents were. Her birth parents, Cass agreed to call them. Oh, her mother said she had sympathy. She said she understood. But she wouldn’t do anything about it.

With a normal adoption, you could march over to the adoption agency and demand to know the names of your birth parents. (“Sure, when you turn eighteen,” her mother repeatedly reminded her. “Until then, the records are sealed.”) Because Cass had been dropped on a doorstep, there was no agency to consult.

To Cass the answer was simple: hire a detective. But her mother refused. Even when Cass said she’d give up her allowance for a year.

So, not for the first time, Cass decided to play detective herself.

“Please help me,” said Cass. “You have no idea what it’s like not to know who your parents are. Your parents fight over you every second of your life.”

“I said OK, didn’t I?”

Max-Ernest made a big show of examining a shoebox on the shelf in front of him. “You think a baby could fit in this—?”

“No.”

“What if it was a midget baby—”

“You know what—why don’t you just leave?”

Before Max-Ernest could respond:

Thunk!

It was the sound of something very heavy dropping on the ground. Followed by a loud insistent pounding on the front door.

?

*I COULDN’T DECIDE WHETHER THE EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRED IN CASS’S GRANDFATHERS’ STORE SHOULD BE PRESENTED AS ONE CHAPTER OR TWO. SO I MADE IT ONE CHAPTER IN TWO PARTS. THAT’S WHAT’S KNOWN AS SPLITTING THE DIFFERENCE.

Thunk!

Again. And more pounding.

“Who is that?” Max-Ernest whispered, pale. “I thought the store was closed.”

Cass shrugged, trying her best to look unconcerned. But she abandoned the box she’d been inspecting and stood up all the same. “Probably somebody unloading their old junk on my grandfathers, like usual.”

Thunk!

Louder this time. They both flinched.

“Yeah, but what if it isn’t?” said Max-Ernest, staring at the front door. “There’s no time to get a message to the Terces Society.”

Cass’s ears tingled in alarm at the mention of their secret organization. “Shh! You never know who’s listening.”

“That’s my point,” Max-Ernest whispered. “The Midnight Sun could be right outside the door, for all we know. How ’bout that?”

Cass looked at him, her ears now turning cold.

Max-Ernest was right. The terrible truth was: they had done such a good job of driving away their enemies they no longer knew where their enemies were.

It had been months since they’d last seen the Midnight Sun’s malevolent leaders, Ms. Mauvais and Dr. L, flying away from a mountaintop graveyard in a black helicopter, and despite the Terces Society’s best efforts, they’d been unable to determine where that helicopter had gone.

Those insidious, invidious, and perfectly perfidious alchemists could be anywhere.

“Maybe they’ve been waiting all this time for your grandfathers to leave,” Max-Ernest continued. “And now they’re going to seize their chance to take revenge on us.”

Cass didn’t say anything; she didn’t have to.

They waited another minute or so—it felt much longer—but there were no more thunks. Just the usual ticks and tocks and whirs and beeps of the many old clocks and assorted gizmos that cluttered the store.

Then they started tiptoeing toward the front door.

Bang! Crash!

They froze. This time the sounds came from inside.

Had somebody broken in?

Grabbing each other’s hands, they started turning around in slow circles (although whether they were looking for the sources of the sounds or for someplace to hide I’m not certain).

Finally, Max-Ernest pointed to the floor—

At his feet were the broken pieces of a ceramic rooster he’d knocked over. That was what had made all the noise. Well, those last noises. The bang and the crash. The thunking and pounding remained to be explained.

They waited another minute. Nothing.

Cass cracked the front door open—

And they breathed matching sighs of relief.

Cass’s first guess had been correct: there were three cardboard boxes waiting for them on the landing.

They wouldn’t have to battle the Midnight Sun, after all. Not right now anyway.

“Let’s see,” Cass said, expertly shaking the boxes one by one. “Shoes—hope they don’t stink too bad… shirts—all stained probably… magazines…”

After struggling to find places in which to squeeze the new merchandise, Cass resumed searching for the cardboard box that had been her very first home.

Max-Ernest, meanwhile, sat back down on his encyclopedia pile and started flipping through the box of magazines. There were many kinds, some recent, some going back years. Sadly for Max-Ernest, there were no puzzle books or magic manuals or science magazines (the three things he was looking for in order of preference).

He was about to close up the box when he noticed a magazine that had been buried near the bottom.

“Hey, look at this—it’s from last week.”

“We? Since when do you care about We?” Cass laughed. “That’s like all celebrity gossip and stuff. Have you even heard of the names in it?”

“I’ve heard of the Skelton Sisters—”