Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (2 page)

Unfortunately, most of the Pelt athletic teams were not very good. It was a small town with a small high school and junior high, so there weren't many athletes to draw from. Their best pitcher, for example, had broken his arm playing football the previous season.

Perhaps this is why the town had become so fanatical about their competitive staring matches. Pelt's high school varsity Stare-Eyes team was well on its way to becoming state champion.

The rules were simple: Pair people off to stare at each other's faces. First person to blink or smile loses. As is said of many games: a moment to learn, a lifetime to master.

Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, could stare like no one else. The Pelt school system had even gone so far as to recruit him as one of their key players, even though he actually wasn't in school anymore, having received his Ph.D. in Ægyptology some years before.

Jasper was the hero of a series of largely forgotten adventure stories for boys in which he invented startling devices and rolled up his sleeves to plunge into adventure from dizzying heights. His powers of staring were almost super human. This is because, in the course of
Jasper Dash and the Sponge-Cake of Zama
, he had spent almost a year studying meditation and martial arts at a secret mountaintop monastery in somewhere like Nepal or Tibet. Now he stared like a force of nature. He could remain unmoving for hours. No one had ever out-stared him.

I should mention that Katie Mulligan was also the star of her own series—the Horror Hollow Series—which took place in Horror Hollow, a small, deeply haunted suburb of Pelt. Katie was
brave and outspoken, especially when confronting algae that needed to be told off or blood-sucking babysitters climbing down the neighbors' walls with tots in their arms.

Lily Gefelty, the third friend in this little group, did not appear in any series of books except for this one, and for that reason she was shier than her friends. She observed things constantly and thought complicated things about what she saw. She watched through her long bangs, blowing them out of the way when there was something she wanted to inspect particularly closely. She admired her friends and wanted their series to become famous again, even though Katie's books were a few years out of date and Jasper's books were now sold mainly in large sets to J. P. Barnigan's American Family Restaurants, a mall chain that purchased books with matching bindings so they could put them up on shelves next to old-time football helmets, oars, snowshoes, cricket bats, parasols, and rustic apple-peelers. This created a mood of hearty, antique
good cheer. Often I have skimmed through the titles of the Jasper Dash series while eating J. P. Barnigan's deep-fried Onion Tumbleweed (appetizer) and drinking a pint of flat Cherry Coke.

Lily yearned for adventure. Though she loved her little town with her whole heart and both of her lungs, sometimes she wished that she could go to exciting places and take part in exciting events like her friends. She had never explored the basements of Inca temples like Jasper or been hunted through the bayous of Louisiana by the panting, fanged Rougarou like Katie on Labor Day weekend. Lily was a little frightened of those things—were-beasts and booby traps—but she wanted to be by the side of her two friends, leading a life less drab than Pelt's, meeting new people, seeing the world, enthusing about its strangeness and variety. Indeed, though she didn't know it, she was about to have an adventure with her friends that would take her to the far ends of the earth.

And what did our heroes look like? A good question in any age. Katie was blond and burned
easily. Lily was a little stockier than Katie and wore clothes that hid most of her. Jasper looked like the outline on the
GO CHILDREN SLOW
sign, that is:

and in fact had been the model for that sign. It had been one of the proudest moments of his career, for he had a deep and abiding hatred of all traffic infractions and jaywalking.

It is of course the
old
GO CHILDREN SLOW
sign on which he had appeared, not to be confused with:

which showed Jasper's archenemy, interdimensional criminal Bobby Spandrel, whose spherical,
silver, featureless head was said to contain just one giant eyeball and whose empty cuffs shot forth photons and flames.
*

The only eyeballs on display at the moment, however, were Jasper's own, as he stared with disturbing intensity at his two friends, holding open his weighted lids. “This contest against the Delaware team might well be the greatest struggle our school's athletic department has ever seen.”

Lily asked, “Have your practices been going well?” She was always good at asking her friends questions when they were dying to talk.

Jasper nodded. “In the last two weeks, indeed, our ragtag band of blinkers and yawners has
become a family—and a tightly knit fighting force, when need be. Coach Meyers has seen to that. He has been stern but caring.”

“You mean
Doctor
Meyers?” said Katie. “The optometrist?”

“He is a fierce but fair man. He knows with almost a sixth sense when our corneas are losing their sap.”

“He did a good job teaching me to put in my contacts,” said Lily. “He told me that putting them in was an art, not a science.”

“So, um, with the team,” said Katie, “Choate Brinsley is the captain now, isn't he?”

“Yes, he is.”

“What's he like? Super nice?”

Jasper shrugged, dislodging a beetle that had landed on his shoulder. “He's a sportsman and a gentleman,” he said.

Lily watched Katie closely. She knew that Katie had a crush on Choate Brinsley.

Jasper mentioned, “I went to Choate's house recently for a rousing game of electronical
soccer. He has a device that plays soccer on a screen.”

“You went to his
house
?” exclaimed Katie. “What was it like?”

Jasper shrugged and considered. “Sound, though hard to defend from the west. To truly make it attack-proof, you'd have to have folding metallic adamantine shutters that slammed down over the glass doors in the kitchen.”

“I mean, what was his
room
like? Did he have any pictures up?”

Jasper looked bewildered. “I'm not sure I understand,” he said. “I really have to go. It's time to get into our uniforms.”

“Okay,” said Katie. “But what were the pictures in his room?”

“There was a movie poster,” said Jasper. “I really must go. Beetles are crawling on my duffel bag.” He shook the bag. Insects flopped onto the sidewalk. “Until later, chums?”

Lily held out her hand. “On the field of battle,” she said.

Jasper smiled, grasped her hand, and shook it. “On the field of battle,” he said, then saluted, turned, and jogged toward the gym doors.

“I can't believe he didn't tell me he went to Choate's house,” said Katie.

“Look at the beetles,” said Lily.

“I'm tired of looking at the beetles,” said Katie.

“They're going away,” said Lily.

Katie turned and inspected the school parking lot. It was true. Suddenly, the beetles were trundling into holes. Some dug furiously with their little pincers. Some slipped into the bark of trees. Some wedged themselves between bricks.

Other cars were pulling up by the curb and kids were getting out. They didn't seem to notice that the morning's insect plague was almost over.

Beetles whirred through the air. They landed near their nesting places. They hid. They seemed terrified.

“I wonder why they're all going away?” said Katie.

Lily hunkered down and watched a line of ladybugs flee into a storm drain.

There was a screech of tires from the street. Lily and Katie looked up. A white van had turned into the parking lot. The windows were tinted.

By the time it pulled into a spot, bucked back out, and pulled in at a better angle, there was not a beetle to be seen. The plague was over. But the danger was just beginning.

The doors to the gym opened, and Choate Brinsley, captain of the Pelt Varsity Stare-Eyes Team came out, dressed in a clean white shirt and khakis. He looked around and checked his watch.

“There's Choate,” said Katie. “He must be waiting to meet the Delaware team and show them their locker room and stuff.” She sighed. “Or he just wanted to come out and have the wind play with his hair more.”

“You really should forget about him,” said Lily gently.

“Omigosh. He's coming this way.”

“This is the sidewalk,” Lily said softly. “He has to come this way. There's grass everywhere else.”

“He's still coming this way.”

Katie had tried to talk to Choate several times. The first time she said hello, he looked at her like she was crazy and walked away. The second time she said hello, a few weeks later, he frowned and said, “
Huh?
Who
are
you?” and then turned around and put books in his locker.

The night he had spoken to her like that, with such scorn and italics, Katie had actually cried at home. Lily had talked to her about it for an hour on the phone. “He doesn't know how great you are,” Lily had said. Katie had wept, “And he never will!” Lily felt awful that her friend cared so much about the opinion of this one, kind of stuck-up, boy. She wished she could convince Katie to forget about him.

Now Choate stood waiting on the sidewalk, right next to Katie and Lily, looking around for his opponents. As kids walked past him toward the gym, he gave them high fives.

The van doors remained closed and locked. No one got out. There was no sign of movement behind the dark glass.

Katie slid a quick glance toward Choate, and then exclaimed loudly to Lily, “Stare-Eyes is the best sport, isn't it?”

“It's fun,” said Lily. “I'm glad Jasper is making friends on the team.”

Katie rolled her eyes at Lily. “I mean,” said Katie, “that I really, really like Stare-Eyes.”

“Oh, good,” said Lily. She caught on that Choate was overhearing their conversation.

“Yup, I just love Stare-Eyes,” said Katie. “I always read all the, you know, statistics and everything.”

“Sure.”

“I get those magazines.”

“Right.”

“I love it. You know who my favorite professional Stare-Eyes player is?”

“I didn't know anyone played it professionally.”

Suddenly Katie realized she didn't know the names of any professional Stare-Eyes players. So she said, “Ralph…”—decided that was stupid,
and corrected herself—“John. Ralph. I mean, Ralph… John… ston… ly… ton…”

Lily nodded. “Oh… yeah. Ralph… Johnstonlyton.” She rocked on her heels.

“Have you heard of him?”

“No,” said Lily, “but then again, you know so much more about professional Stare-Eyes than I do.”

Katie could tell, miserably, that Choate was still listening in, but that things weren't going too well. “Yeah,” she said nervously. “Ralph, um, Johnslyunton… ston… He's the best.”

“Oh,” said Lily.

“I just love Stare-Eyes,” said Katie. “You know how I love to stare at things.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Lily. “You can just stare for hours sometimes.”

“Um,” whispered Katie, leaning close to her friend. “Now I'm maybe starting to sound a little brain-dead. Let's go back to Ralph Johnslyuntonston.”

“I don't think Choate's listening anymore,”
Lily whispered back. “And maybe next time you should make up a name that you can remember.”

Katie made a sour, sassy face at Lily. Lily made a sassy, sour face back. They glared at each other. They both tried not to smile. That didn't last long. They started to laugh. Katie laughed so hard that she hit her shin on a railing and had to say, “Ow ow ow ow ow.”

At that point, some of Choate's friends came along, wearing sweats, punching each other on the arm. They were yelling at each other, “Don't kill my fresh, dude! You're totally killing my fresh!”