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“I mean, he’s a present. For you.”
“Oh. Well.” He looked at the budgie as if it were the last thing in the universe he needed. Georgie couldn’t believe Agnes had made her come here.
Bug shifted the pile of T-shirts in his arms. “Thanks. Um. You want to come in?”
“Sure,” said Georgie, certain she’d rather have gum surgery.
Bug led the way through the huge double doors into his apartment. Huge, with wide windows on two sides, it should have been bright and cheerful. Instead, the place had the look of a charity shop, packed with odd, unrelated items and not nearly enough actual furniture. A fine tapestry hung on a wall next to random posters of athletes. A giant stuffed gorilla sat in the corner of the living room. A suit of armour stood by the doors to the apartment. Georgie had heard that living alone made people weird, and this apartment was proof. She wondered where his agent, who was now his legal guardian, was. Bug always made it sound as if the guy was like a father to him.
“Sorry about the mess,” Bug said. “I was just going to do some laundry.” He dropped the clothes he’d been holding on to the ones strewn all over the floor. “There’s a chair around here somewhere.” He kicked through piles of junk to a lone chair set in front of a television the size of a cinema screen. “Here,” he said. “Sit down.”
“Thanks,” Georgie said.
Bug eyed Pinkwater’s cage. “I guess we can put that on the floor.” He set Pinkwater’s cage down. “Do you want something to drink? I’m not sure what I’ve got.”
“Anything is OK,” Georgie said.
He left, and Georgie could hear him banging around in the kitchen. “All I have is Kangaroo Kola.”
“That’s good,” said Georgie.
He came back with two cans, one for her and one for himself. “I did an ad for them,” he said. “They sent me a year’s supply.”
“Great,” said Georgie. She sipped her Kangaroo Kola. If you could fly, Kangaroo Kola could make you fly just a teeny bit higher (or so the advertisements claimed). Georgie supposed that was the only reason why people drank the stuff. It tasted like cough syrup.
“So,” Bug said. “Thanks again for the bird.”
“What’s a Wing without a pet bird, right?” She almost winced as she said this, it was so lame.
“Right,” said Bug. “Maybe I should let him out?”
Georgie shrugged. Bug crouched and opened the door to the cage. The budgie whirled around the room.
Bug said, “Does he have a name?”
“Pinkwater’s Momentary Lapse of Concentration, CD, Number Fourteen,” Georgie told him. “He’s a show bird. They all have names like that.” Abruptly, Pinkwater dive-bombed Georgie’s head, startling her so much that she spilled her Kangaroo Kola. She scrambled to her feet. “Oh no! I hope I didn’t get anything on your chair.”
“Nope. All over yourself, though.”
Plucking at the cold, wet patches on her thighs, she wanted to disappear again. She picked up one foot and shook it, spraying droplets of soda everywhere. “Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it. All these companies are always sending me T-shirts and stuff that I never use. I’ll get you some.” His eyes brightened. “And you know I’m doing this big ad campaign for Skreechers, right? I’ve got a million pairs of Skreechers trainers. I’m sure I’ll have something that fits you.” He eyed her feet. “You look about the same size as me.”
He turned and walked to the bedroom while Georgie sat, blushing furiously. Great, she thought. She had feet the same size as a guy. Just what every girl dreams of. Maybe she’d grow a moustache, too. Yeah. That would be really cool.
She folded her arms and waited. It was so strange to be here, to see Bug in this big and messy place, like he was some little kid playing house. Which, she thought, he was. So many things here seemed familiar. Like the monkey in the corner. The suit of armour. The tapestry on the wall, just like Bug’s father had in his lair. She hugged herself even tighter.
Bug came out of the bedroom carrying jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of trainers. “Here,” he said. “You can put these on in the bathroom.” He pointed. “Over there.”
“Thanks,” she said. She went to the bathroom and shut the door. She dropped the wet clothes to the floor and pulled on the dry ones. Thankfully, they were big enough to fit her. (It would have been horrible if the stuff had been too small.) Then she looked at herself in the mirror and sighed. The T-shirt said HOT STUFF in orange flames. She was hot stuff, all right. Her hair was in its customary thick ponytail, but random wisps stuck out all over, spraying sideways and tumbling down her shoulders and back. “Hi!” she said to the mirror. “I’m HOT STUFF!”
“What?” Bug called from outside the door. “Did you say something?”
“No!” Georgie said. And then, under her breath, “Just talking to myself like a complete lunatic.” She pulled out the ponytail and tried to comb her hair with her fingers as best she could, but it was no use. Her hair, like her body, was apparently intent on taking over the city.
Georgie threw open the bathroom door. “I have world domination hair,” she said irritably.
Bug frowned. “What?”
“Never mind,” Georgie said. She was going to sit in the chair, but Bug was sitting in it. She searched the room for another chair, but she didn’t see one. She settled for a coffee table shaped like a tree stump. Or maybe it was a tree stump, she didn’t know. Perching on the stump, she said, “Thanks for the stuff. I’ll give it back to you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bug said.
Georgie frantically searched her feeble brain for something to say. “Do you know that pen that your… um… that Sweetcheeks wanted me to steal from my dad?”
“Yeah?”
“You won’t believe what it does.”
“Let me guess: writes?”
Georgie glanced up sharply, a little hurt that Bug sounded so sarcastic. “Yes, it writes. But it makes anything you write with it come true.”
Bug raised an eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope. But things come true only the way the pen wants them to come true.”
“No way.”
“That’s what The Professor told my dad. And that’s what my dad told me. That people wouldn’t even be able to fly if someone hadn’t written something about flying a long time ago.”
“I think I remember The Professor hinting around about that the first time we met him. Something about how people weren’t supposed to fly.”
“Yes,” Georgie said. “But whoever started it didn’t write, ‘I wish all people could fly’ or whatever, he wrote something else, something that had nothing to do with flying at all. The pen did whatever it wanted to do. And now, well… you know the rest.”
“Wow,” said Bug.
“Wow is right,” said Georgie. She waited for Bug to say something else, but he didn’t. “So, um, if you had that pen, what would you want to write with it?”
“What?” said Bug. “I don’t know.”
“Come on. You must want something. It’s a pen that makes dreams come true.” Yikes, she thought. She sounded like one of those chain e-mails people send to all their relatives. She was now giving herself the creeps.
“My dreams did come true,” Bug said, fidgeting. “I mean, I’m a Wing now, right? And in all these adverts. Did I tell you about the Skreecher campaign?”
So much for conversation. “Yeah, you did. Just before.”
“Oh.” He pulled the sleeves of his jumper over his hands. He tipped his head, as if he was considering something. “So, how do you like school?”
“OK,” said Georgie, too embarrassed to tell him about Roma Radisson. Too embarrassed to tell him that even though she might be The Richest Girl in the Universe, no one liked her any better for it.
“I’ve got tutors,” said Bug. “Too much work to do to go to school.”
“I don’t know that falling into the East River counts as work.” She hadn’t meant to say that, but out it popped. When your arms and legs and feet and hair are threatening to take over the world and you’re wearing a T-shirt that says HOT STUFF in orange flames, things that you don’t intend pop out.
“I didn’t fall,” Bug said. “Something pulled me into the water.”
“OK,” said Georgie. “Whatever you say.”
Bug’s cheeks got noticeably redder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Georgie said, backtracking. “I don’t know what happened. I heard about it on TV. I wasn’t there.”
“No, you weren’t there.” He muttered something under his breath, something that sounded like “You’re never there.”
“What?” Georgie said.
Bug shook his head, a lock of sandy-brown hair falling into his eyes. “Forget it.”
More silence. Pinkwater’s Momentary Lapse of Concentration seemed to feel the tension, seemed to want to fix it. He darted back and forth between Bug and Georgie, as if he were trying to stitch them together. “Hello!” he squeaked. “Hello, you person!” He alighted on Bug’s shoulder, and proceeded to bonk Bug in the cheek with the top of his little blue head. Bonk, bonk.
“I think he wants you to pet him,” said Georgie.
Bonk.
“Oh,” Bug said. He reached up and petted the bird.
“Purr,” the bird said.
“Once he stops dive-bombing, he’s OK,” Bug said.
“Purr,” said the bird.
Georgie watched Bug pet the bird. “I think he likes you.”
“I think he does too,” Bug said. “So where’s Noodle?”
“Home,” Georgie said. “Which is probably where I should be going.” She felt tired and she felt stupid and she missed Noodle and she missed Agnes and the edge of the tree stump was making her bum ache. Maybe, she thought, she was outgrowing more than clothes and shoes. Maybe she was outgrowing her friend, too. That thought made her achy right in the middle of her chest.
Bug looked down at the clothes spread across the floor like wads of seaweed left by a storm surge. “It’s OK. I’ve got lots to do anyway.”
He seemed so lonely that for a second Georgie almost changed her mind, almost said something crazy like “Hey, maybe we could go flying in the park. Maybe we could make ourselves invisible and sneak into the cinema.” But she didn’t say these things. What she said was: “I like your suit of armour.”
“Thanks,” Bug said. “I found it. Well, that’s not exactly true. There were these guys moving out a couple of floors down. I think they meant to take it with them, but they forgot it in the hallway.”
“So you stole it,” Georgie said.
“I didn’t steal it. They forgot it,” Bug said.
“You could have found them,” said Georgie.
“How would I do that?”
“You could have asked around for their new address.” She had no idea why she was saying this stuff. She didn’t care about the suit of armour. And for all she knew, those guys didn’t want it any more and left it on purpose. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. “You could have shipped it to them.”
“I said, they forgot it.”
“Fine,” said Georgie.
“Anyway, you should talk.”
“What?”
“You’ve stolen things before,” Bug said. “A lot of things.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” said Georgie, getting angry.
“No? There was Noodle. She was just wandering around, and you kept her. And you don’t seem to feel too bad about it. What’s so different?”
Georgie felt the rush of blood through her veins, as if all of sudden she had too much blood and not nearly enough vein. “You sound just like your father.”
Bug sounded like a robot when he said: “Get out.”
“Bug, I just meant—”
Bug flew forwards so fast that he blurred before her eyes, and Pinkwater exploded into the air in a burst of feathers. “Get out!”
Georgie jumped back, whipped round and charged towards the door. As she ran, she misjudged her footing, slamming into the suit of armour. It fell over like a stack of pots and pans. She opened the door, Pinkwater’s disapproving chirp following her out:
“Bad!”
Chapter 5
Punk Rock
Georgie sprinted nearly all the way home from Bug’s apartment, slowing only to catch her breath before she reached her building. She didn’t want anyone to think she’d been running from something. Because she wasn’t running. She’d just been in a hurry to get home, that’s all. Bug? Who’s Bug? Oh, that weird-looking guy in the Cheeky Monkey ads.
“Ha!”
Georgie focused in on the crow perched in a nearby tree. “What are you looking at?”
“Ha! Ha!” said the crow.
“Keep laughing, beak-face. I’m going upstairs to get my kitty.”
“Ha!”
Dexter the doorman was waiting at the entrance of the building. “Good afternoon, Miss Bloomington,” he said gravely. He said everything gravely. His grave manner went with the grey hair, the grey beard and the grey uniform.
“Good afternoon, Dexter.”
“It’s Deitrich, Miss.”
“Oh, sorry,” said Georgie. “Deitrich.”
“Are you all right?” Deitrich said. (Gravely.)
“Yes, why?”
Georgie was tall, but Deitrich was one of the few people who was much, much taller. He looked down at her, gravely, but kindly. “You seem sad.”
“Sad? No, I’m not sad. I’m absolutely fine. Great, even,” Georgie told him.
“Of course,” said Deitrich, opening the door so that she could enter the building, discreetly slipping her a tissue so that she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose before going up to the penthouse.
“Georgie? Is that you?” Bunny Bloomington drifted into the foyer. “You’re a little late.”
Georgie couldn’t imagine she’d been more than an hour, but she knew her mother. “I hope you didn’t worry.”
Bunny pressed a kiss to Georgie’s cheek. “I didn’t. At least, not that much. Well, a little bit. Some.” She looked at Georgie critically, as if seeing her for the first time. “Where did you get those clothes?”
Georgie had forgotten about the clothes. How could she forget about the clothes? And, duh! She’d left her own clothes at Bug’s! “I spilled some Kangaroo Kola on myself, so Bug gave me this stuff to wear.”
Georgie could see her mother working to take this information in. “Oh,” Bunny said. “Next time you’re on a long visit, could you give me a call, please? I’m not saying that I don’t trust you, please don’t think I don’t trust you, I know you’re thirteen, and—”
“I know, Mum,” Georgie said. “You’re right. I should have called.”
Bunny bit her lip. “You and Bug didn’t decide to go on any, um, outings, did you?” That was her mother’s word for invisible exploration. Outings. “Because I’m just not comfortable with that. That’s the very thing that got you kidnapped in the first place, and I’m so afraid that someone will see you popping in and out of sight and get ideas.”
“Mum, we didn’t go on any outings. We sat in his apartment for a while and I left.”
“His apartment,” Bunny said. “Was that man there? His guardian? What’s his name? Foo Foo?”
“Juju?”
“Yes, Voodoo. Was he there?”
Georgie got the idea that her mother would not be pleased to hear that she had spent some time with a boy alone in his bachelor pad. “Juju was there. He looks like a turtle.”
“Yes, well, it’s not his fault, is it?” Bunny said.
“Guess not.”
“So,” Bunny said. “How is Bug doing these days? I see him all over the television and in every magazine.”
“Bug’s a jerk,” said Georgie.
“What? Did you two have an argument?”
Georgie sighed. “Sort of. I don’t know.”
“Well, you are getting older. You’re changing. Becoming a beautiful young woman. Maybe,” Bunny said, “that’s confusing to your friend.”
Georgie sighed again. There was nothing beautiful about what she was becoming, she was sure of it. In the short time she had known her parents, she had grown to love them with all her heart. That didn’t mean she always understood everything they said to her. And it didn’t mean that they always understood everything she said to them.
“Maybe he’s confused because he didn’t know that a girl could actually get to be twenty metres tall,” Georgie said.
“Oh, honey,” Bunny told her, “there’s nothing wrong with being tall. It doesn’t mean boys won’t like you. Your Aunt Tallulah on your father’s side was very tall, and she had five husbands! Or was it six?”
“That’s something to look forward to,” said Georgie.
Bunny laughed. “Noodle missed you, you know. She’s been yelling at me for the last half hour. Sometimes I swear she’s trying to tell me something and if I listened hard enough, I’d understand.”
“Where is she?” Georgie said.
“In your room. The last time I checked, she was playing solitaire on the computer, but she might be napping. If people knew what that cat could do, everyone would want one.”
“I’m going to say hi to her,” said Georgie.
“Sure,” Bunny said. “I didn’t even ask you. How was the museum?”
“Filled with lots of stuffed dead things,” Georgie said.
“Just the way a museum should be,” her mother said. “Anyway, you can relax for a while. Maybe we can all watch a film after dinner. How does that sound?”
Her parents preferred films in black-and-white with people tap-dancing and twirling around in fedoras saying things like “swell” and “you don’t say?” but Georgie didn’t have the heart to tell her mum that the films all made her bored and sleepy. “That sounds great, Mum.”
Georgie went to her room, where she found Noodle sprawled across her bed. As soon as she walked in the door, the cat opened her eyes and began berating her with fierce yowls.
“I know, I know,” Georgie said. “Where was I all day long?”
“Yowl,” said Noodle.
“What was so important that I had to leave my favourite cat?”
“Yowl,” said Noodle.
“What’s my problem?”
“Yowl,” said Noodle.
“Why am I so boring? Why is Bug such a rock head? Why is my hair so weird? How come I’m built like a daddy longlegs?”
Noodle was silent, choosing to jump down from the bed and wind herself around Georgie’s legs until Georgie picked her up. “Why does everyone hate me, Noodle?” Georgie said again, her nose in Noodle’s fur. As usual, when she held Noodle, when she petted Noodle, a strange riddle came into her head: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If a tree falls, if a tree falls, if a tree falls…
The next thing she knew, her mother was calling her for dinner. She put Noodle back on the bed. Her head felt empty and clean and light, and she wasn’t quite so miserable.
“Thanks,” she said. She could have sworn Noodle nodded before curling up for yet another nap.
“How’s my best girl?” said Solomon Bloomington as Georgie came in to the dining room and kissed his cheek. It was what he always said.
“I’m your only girl,” Georgie replied. It was what she always said.
“Not such a girl any more,” he said. “A young woman!”
Georgie smiled, wishing that her parents would stop with the young woman thing. It made her tense. She’d barely had any time to be a girl with them. And now she had to hurry up and be a woman? No, thank you.
“Still a girl for a while,” Georgie said, and her father beamed.
“How was the school trip?” he wanted to know.
“OK,” she said.
“What did you learn?”
She shrugged.
Sol piled his plate with roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy and fluffy biscuits that Agnes had prepared. (Agnes didn’t believe in diets. Or cholesterol. Or vegetables.)
“You must have learned something,” Sol said. “A word in another language? The name of a former president? A major scientific discovery?”
“Let’s see,” said Georgie. “I learned that Roma Radisson is about as deep a thinker as this.” She held up one of Agnes’s biscuits.
“Hmmm. That might be an insult to the biscuit,” Sol said.
“Sol!” said Bunny.
“Well, you’ve met the girl,” said Sol.
“Sol!”
“What?”
Bunny clucked her tongue at them both, but Georgie could see that she was smiling. Georgie devoured many slices of meat, a pile of potatoes and four biscuits. She was about to reach for a fifth when she realised that perhaps it was Agnes’s high-calorie food that had caused her freakish growth spurt. She decided to skip dessert, which was some sort of quadruple-chocolate, triple-fudge, double-butter, possibly deep-fried cake.
After dinner, the family retired to the media room, which was set up like a cinema, complete with stadium seating and a popcorn machine. Sol cued up one of his favourite black-and-white films, one about a guy who goes to Paris and meets some beautiful girl who doesn’t talk that much but dances around a lot, and the two of them dance on the ground and dance in the air and the whole thing ends up in this long ballet sequence that Georgie didn’t entirely understand, but didn’t find entirely horrible. At least, she didn’t fall asleep. But her parents did. By the end of the film, the two of them were slumped in their seats, their heads tipped together, as if one were about to turn and whisper something to the other. Georgie watched them for a while as the credits rolled. They were nice people, her parents. Nobody had a right to be miserable with parents like these. So what if Bug was a jerk face? So what if Roma was an idiot? So what if the Prince School was packed with spoiled princesses who’d never had to work for anything in their whole entire lives? She wouldn’t be there for ever. As a matter of fact, she would only be going to the school for a few more months before she’d move on to high school. That would have to be better, wouldn’t it? She would have to try harder to be happy.
Georgie kissed her parents good night, careful not to wake them. She wandered back to her bedroom where Noodle was looking at a website called catsinexile.com, which seemed to be some sort of blog with photos. Georgie was amazed to see so many pictures of so many different cats, considering how rare cats were. Maybe some cats had escaped The Professor’s apartment. But then, she didn’t want to think about The Professor, not really. Cats reminded her of stealing, which reminded her of Bug, which reminded her of the mean, mean thing she’d said to him in his apartment and the way he’d yelled at her and told her to get out, and she didn’t want to think about that any more. She didn’t want to think about it ever.
She changed into a pair of pajamas and crawled into bed. She considered the pile of books on her nightstand before pulling Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from the pile. She was nearly finished with the book; she was right near the end where the glass lift flies. Georgie knew a lot of things that flew, but none of them were lifts. She liked this book very much.
She settled back into her pillow, opening the book with a sigh. She had just read a single paragraph when an odd noise caught her attention. An odd, shuffling sort of noise, like a cat wearing slippers.
She looked at Noodle, but Noodle was downloading a photo of a white kitten sleeping in a sink and seemed absorbed in the work. Probably the computer making the noise. Sometimes the computer whirred and chuffed like an animal. Georgie shrugged, and went back to her book.
Shush, shush, shush.
Georgie glanced up sharply. A shadow lurked under door. As if someone stood behind it. Listening.
“Mum?” Georgie whispered.
No answer.
“Agnes?”
There was someone behind the door, Georgie was sure of it. But who? The Bloomingtons had the most advanced alarm system in the universe. People couldn’t just walk into the building. And nobody could just walk into the Bloomingtons’ penthouse. It was ridiculous. It was imposs—