Jack James and the Tribe of the Teddy Bear (3 page)

THEY STROLLED OUTSIDE and a seagull squawked overhead. It swept downhill toward the waterfront, where a fleet of trawlers sat in their slips. Massive Willow Bridge loomed on the horizon, a gateway to the mighty Pacific beyond. The Columbia River stretched for miles, carving the landscape and ensconcing the town of Willow between Young’s Bay and the coastal mountain range. It was the far northwest corner of Oregon, and distant, snow-tipped peaks, shrouded in haze, sat nestled in green foothills bisected by valley after valley after valley. Overlooking the school from the top of Coxcomb Hill stood Willow Column, a 125-foot tower and historic landmark. On the far bank sparkled the state of Washington, teeming with evergreens as far as the eye cared to wander.

It was a magical place. Jack had always thought so. He loved the glorious scenery of Willow. He didn’t have time to take in the sights, though. He was too busy gazing at Amelia.

“Listen, about your presentation,” she changed the subject. “I think you were missing something.”

“Oh, yeah, what would that be?” he forgot all about his nerves.

“I just didn’t know where you were going with the whole ‘monsters’ thing. I mean, why be so sensationalist about it?”

He eyed her. “It’s not sensationalist when you think about it, really. With multiple dimensions, anything is possible, even the existence of what we would call, ‘monsters.’ Where they come from they might not be monsters at all. Heck, in his own world a vampire might be ordinary. Like me and you.”

“Hey, who are you calling ordinary?” she gave a wry smile.

“Well, maybe not us. We’re not so ordinary. Neither is my dad. He’s the one who first taught me about the multiverse when I was a kid.”

“When you were a kid? What are you now, like a hundred?”

“You know what I mean,” he laughed. “Ever since I was a baby, my dad’s been letting me in on his work. I knew about different dimensions even before I could walk. It’s really important research, and he’s on the verge of a breakthrough that might just change the world.”

“If it’s so important, then why are those boys always teasing you?”

“You know how it is with people like Dillon and Mike,” he shook his head. “I mean, they’re always making fun of my dad and his work, but if I only…”

Jack quit talking when both boys hopped from behind a hedgerow as if uttering their names had summoned them magically.

“My dad, my dad!” Mike whined. “Blah, blah, blah, my dad!”

The two chortled.

“Your dad’s a weirdo,” Dillon spoke faster than ever. “Him and his half-baked experiments, he almost blew up the town!”

Cackling, the two circled Jack and his new friend.

“Leave him alone, you creeps!” Amelia hissed.

“Amelia?” Wendy showed up, wearing a look of disdain through her narrow glasses. Behind her, with hands on hips, stood her groupies Jamie, Heather and Betsy. “What in the world are you doing with
him
?”

Amelia held her chin high and regarded Jack, then Wendy. She kept her lips tight. He could tell she wanted to say something and was holding back.

“You don’t…
like
him, do you?”

The girls giggled uncontrollably, then started singing in sickly sarcastic voices.
“Jack and Amelia sittin’ in a tree…”

“Oh, grow UP!” Amelia waved her hand. “I was just talking to him about his presentation.”

“You mean his freak show,” Dillon butted in, chatting a mile a minute. “Him and his weird ideas, always going on and on about his kooky dad. What is it again, Jack? What’s your dad gonna do? Travel to a new dimension? What a freak!”

“You don’t know anything about my father,” Jack barked at him.

“Sure I do,” he barked back. “I know enough. I know he used to be a teacher until…the incident.”

Mike howled and slapped Jack hard between his shoulders.

“The incident? What incident?” Amelia sounded perplexed.

“You mean you don’t know?” Dillon seemed pleased to have the audience for his humiliating tale. “He blew up the high school.”

“He did not!” protested Jack. “It was just a little accident.”

“Little? You call that little!” Dillon raised his voice so everyone within a square mile heard. “My sister said they had to evacuate the entire school. He caused millions of dollars in damage.”

“It was only a few hundred thousand, not millions. And no one was hurt,” countered Jack.

Dillon responded, “He was lucky nobody was
killed
. People said he had, oh I don’t know, something like one point one kajillion gigawatts of electricity pumping through there for some…what was it, Jack? What was he doing?”

Jack did his best to blink away a tear before anyone noticed it. Too late.

“Oh, look,” Wendy spouted. “I think he’s about to cry!”

“Stop it, all of you!” Amelia resisted. “Can’t you see you’re hurting his feelings!”

“Wow,” Dillon grinned. “Check out New Girl. Doesn’t she have an attitude? I think New Girl might be hiding something behind that attitude of hers. What do you guys think?”

“I think you might be right, Dillon,” Wendy agreed.

“Just leave us alone, okay?” Jack spoke up. “What will it take to get you to leave us alone?”

“I know,” Betsy raised her hand as if still in class. “Truth or dare!”

“Truth or dare! Truth or dare!” the girls chanted all at once.

“That’s a great idea!” Wendy came alight.

“No-ho way!” Jack protested. “Not truth or dare. Not again.”

“Not you, stupid,” she pointed at Amelia. “Her.”

Jack eyed Amelia, then Wendy. “You can’t make her do anything. Amelia, don’t listen to her.”

“No, Jack. It’s okay,” she cast a glance at Wendy. “If I play your silly game, will you leave Jack alone about his dad?”

Wendy asked the boys, “You okay with that?”

“All right,” Dillon wiped his hands. “New Girl? Truth or dare?”

She sized him up, squinting until it seemed she was going to cause his brain to explode with her mind. Then she made her decision heard.

“Truth.”

“Truth it is,” he laughed. “Tell us, New Girl. Exactly why did you have to move to Willow? And remember, you have to tell the truth.”

Her smile disappeared. She blinked twice and sighed. “Oh, all right. Fine. Dare.”

“She changes her mind!” Dillon flung his hands. “Dare, huh? Let’s see here.”

“I know,” Wendy whispered into his ear.

His eyes darted and his mouth dropped. “YES! Okay, New Girl. Here’s your dare. I dare you…”

“WE dare,” Wendy added.

“Okay, okay.
We
dare you to kiss Jack!”

The kids let out a united,
“Whooo!”

Jack’s stomach came alive. The butterflies were fighting to get out all at once. He tried not to look at Amelia, but his actions were involuntary. He feared she would be shocked, or worse, disgusted. Instead, what he saw both surprised and pleased him. She wasn’t sickened by the prospect. Quite the opposite. She seemed more than willing to accept.

“Okay,” she smiled. The butterflies went crazy.

“Whooo!”
again went the chorus.

“We’re not talking about some little peck on the cheek, either. We mean a real kiss.”

Amelia was unfazed. “Okay.”

“On the lips.”

Everyone went silent.

“Okay.”

“Whooo!”

Jack thought he’d pass out. When he’d gotten up that morning, he figured the most interesting thing that would happen to him all day was maybe he’d get a few questions about omnidimensional power, not a kiss from the prettiest girl in school.

Amelia took him by the elbows. Staring, she leaned in.

“Wait!” Dillon stopped her. “Jack. You need to be blindfolded.”

“What! Why!” Amelia protested. “Jack, what do you think?”

“He doesn’t mind,” Dillon put his hands over Jack’s eyes. “No peeking, now. Okay, New Girl. Go for it.”

Jack waited, trying not to exhale. He wasn’t sure if he had bad breath or not. The burger he ate for lunch had onions.

“Okay, Jack! Here she comes,” Dillon announced.

“Pucker up, Jack,” Mike advised him. “Get ready for your kiss!”

His first kiss. It was happening.

“And…NOW!”

He felt moisture on his lips. Without waiting, he pressed against Amelia. Gently, yet firm, matching her boldness. He wanted the moment to last forever, wanted to savor her delicate, milky skin against his.

Something seemed wrong. He couldn’t see, though he still had his sense of smell, and he knew for a fact Amelia didn’t reek of mud and grass. He pulled away and ran his tongue across his front teeth, crunching on grit. Then Dillon yanked his hands from Jack’s face and everyone exploded in hysterics.

“Ta-Daaa!” Mike snickered, holding one of his retro Jordans, the sole extra muddy from an afternoon of stomping in the baseball field. “Congratulations. You just kissed my shoe! Ha, ha!”

The boys lost control, shoving each other, gushing with hilarity. Wendy held up her cellphone, recording the mortifying event to post on her blog, probably. In a similar state of glee, her loyal followers pointed and giggled and held each other from falling.

Jack spat up again and again, wiping on his polo shirt collar, trying to get the mossy, mucky taste out of his mouth. He gave Amelia a perplexed frown. She saw him and shrugged.

A startling car horn made him forget his revulsion temporarily.

“Come on, Mike, let’s go!”

It was Wade, Mike’s older brother, in his so-called classic Chevrolet Monte Carlo.

“That’s my ride,” Mike had to yell over the roar of his brother’s engine. He raised his fist to Dillon. “Later, man.”

The boys bumped knuckles, then Mike got into the car.

“Jack, you stay weird,” he winked. His brother revved his motor once more and peeled off.

“Oh, Amel-i-a,” Wendy sang. “Come o-on.”

Amelia shuffled to the snickering girls as they hurried to board their bus.

“C’mon, Jack,” Dillon slapped him on the back. “I’ll walk ya’ to the store.”

His stomach revolted again.

“Dillon, just because our moms work at the same place doesn’t mean we have to walk there together every day.”

“Geez, grumpy!” he smiled. “I just wanted to give you a little advice, that’s all.”

“I don’t want your advice.”

Ignoring Jack’s wishes, Dillon slowed from his usual rapid fire to something resembling a normal speech pattern.

“Jack, you’re smart. You’re not a total troll. You’ve got good things going for you. If only you’d stop all that stupid talk about your dad and his weird science stuff, you’d be popular. Don’t you wanna be popular?”

He thought about it. No matter how much he wanted to deny it, Dillon was right. He
did
want to be popular. Everyone did. But, more than that, he wanted his ideas to be popular. He wanted the other kids to listen to his dad’s theories about omnidimensional energy, and how it would alter the future of the human race. Was that too much to ask?

“That’s a big problem, too, Jack,” Dillon forced him from his thoughts. “Right there, what you’re doing right now. That daydreaming crap. That’s gotta end. No slipping off into la-la dreamland. It’s creepy, man.”

Jack kept quiet, figuring Dillon would get tired of hearing his own voice and give up. No such luck.

“Listen, you gotta stop with the spooky science stuff, okay?”

Jack frowned at the pavement. Asking him to stop thinking about science was the same as asking the sun to stop shining, or in Oregon it would have been like asking the rain to quit falling. The only thing even remotely comforting was he knew they’d almost made it across the parking lot to Winmart. Thank goodness, too. If he had to spend just one more second with Dillon, he would have yanked out his own hair. Just a few more steps and he’d be inside the store, hearing his mom saying those magical words…

“Let’s go home.”

“WE CAN’T GO HOME yet, Jack. Sorry,” Elizabeth James wiped both hands on her nauseatingly green Winmart apron. “I have to work late.”

“Mom!” he complained. “I really wanna go home.”

“I know, sweetheart,” she tried to disarm him with a smile. “I have to stay, though.”

“No you don’t. You don’t have to stay. No one’s forcing you. Let’s go, Mom.”

“You sound just like your father,” she sighed and brushed aside her light chestnut bangs. “I can’t stand how that man has warped your brain. Why won’t you two ever learn? As opposed to you and your dad, I live in the real world, you hear me? With responsibilities and bills to pay. We have rent, we have to eat…”

“But Mom!”

“I don’t have time to argue with you, Jack. There’s a ton of inventory that just came in, and it’s my job to deal with it. So you have two choices: you can go play in Kid Kastle, or you can help me.”

He bent to get a view of Kid Kastle, a play area sectioned off by a wall of Styrofoam slabs painted gray to look like a medieval fortress. In one of the decorated windows, he saw Dillon, pressed against the glass, his mouth agape and attached, resembling the sucker of a giant squid.

“I, um,” Jack deliberated. “I think I’ll help you.”

“Oh, honey,” his mom noticed his moodiness. “Why don’t you want to play with your friend? He seems really nice.”

He gave his mother a cynical glance and followed her through a set of swinging doors leading to the storeroom. There they found a heavyset man in brown shorts wheeling in stacks of boxes.

“Howdy, folks,” the man greeted them. Jack spotted the name,
Doug
, embroidered on his shirt. “Got a special delivery for ya’,” Doug smiled from ear to ear at Jack. “TOYS!”

He was a kid on Christmas morning. Jack, on the other hand, didn’t impress so easy.

“Come on, now,” Doug tried to coax a smile from the boy. “You’ve gotta like toys.”

“He loves toys, don’t you, Jack?” his mother spoke for him. “Don’t be rude, answer the man.”

He took a breath to ready his reply when the door swung open. In walked Dillon with his mother Roberta Shane, the store assistant manager. Actually, Jack refused to believe Roberta was Dillon’s mom. They were nothing alike. While he was short, fair-haired and skinny, she was tall, brunette and, well, not skinny.

“Be sure to check each box and verify the inventory,” she gave Doug the eye. “We don’t want any more missing Gameboys.”

“Yeah,” Dillon added.

“Hey, I told you,” Doug kept smiling. “Those Gameboys didn’t make it to the truck. Not my fault.”

“Now, now, Doug,” she had the tone of a scolding teacher. “No one’s blaming you. We just want to get it right this time, okay?”

“Yeah,” clearly, Dillon enjoyed his mother’s position of authority.

“Here’s the invoice,” she handed Liz a small stack of papers. “Be thorough.”

“Yeah,” Dillon used a repulsively high-pitched voice while twitching in a marionette’s dance.

“Dillon, that’s enough,” finally Roberta noticed his antics. “Oh, hey! I have an idea.”

Right when she said it, Jack knew.
No, no, no,
he thought. A futile plea. He saw she was weary of her son’s clowning by the sideways glance.

“Why don’t you stay back here and help Liz and Jack with this inventory while I finish up out front, ‘kay, sweetie?”

“But, Mom, I wanna…”

“No ‘buts’ young man. Just do what I…”

“But I don’t wanna…”

“Now what did I just say? You never….”

“Oh, Mom. Why can’t I…”

“Don’t use that tone with me. Why I oughtta…”

The two went in a circle for a few more entertaining moments, each trying to outduel the other verbally, until Roberta put an abrupt and noisy halt to it all.

“ENOUGH!”

Dillon snapped his mouth closed, staring at his mom.

“I want you to help back here, and that’s the end of it. You hear me, young man?”

He glared at her.

“Dillon Andrew Shane! You’d better lose that attitude real quick, or your video game privileges will be suspended for a week!”

After the initial shock, he grinned at Liz. “How can I help you, Mrs. James?”

Roberta smiled. “Good boy. Let’s all get to work, shall we?”

The woman swung her ample frame and strode out the door.

“Okay. Tell you what,” Liz considered the boys, then the boxes. She handed an electronic scanner to Jack. “You guys can take turns scanning the boxes for me. Then you can tell me the numbers so I can double check them with the invoice. Sound good?”

“Sounds great! Gimme
that
!” Dillon ripped the device from Jack’s hands.

“Hey!” Jack protested.

“Now, boys,” Liz searched through the papers. “Don’t fight. That thing’s expensive.”

“This piece of junk?” Dillon examined it. “It doesn’t even play games.”

“It’s not supposed to,” Jack held out his hand. “Here, let me show you.”

“Back off, man. I can handle this,” Dillon searched one of the newly delivered boxes. “Done this thousands of times.”

“Okay, okay,” Liz seemed almost out of patience. “Just scan it and tell me what the numbers say.”

Dillon fumbled, not sure which label to hunt for. Doug gave him a hint, pointing at a bar code. “Right there.”

“I knew that,” Dillon retorted. “You just do your job and I’ll do mine.”

Doug’s gregarious smile evaporated. He glanced at Liz. She raised her brow.

Dillon ran the scanner across the symbol, causing it to issue a coarse
Buzz!

“What’s it say?” Liz inquired.

“Um, okay,” he stalled. “Oh five dash seven.”

Liz flipped through the pages. “I can’t stand these forms. Why do they have to make them so confusing? All codes and numbers. Just give me an old-fashioned list.”

“Some computer geek somewhere has to justify his job,” Doug laughed under his breath.

“Exactly,” Liz giggled with him. “Listen, Dillon. How about this? Just find the box marked, zero five dash one, okay?”

“Sure, Mrs. J,” he studied a box.

“Oh five dash four—not it,” he moved on to the next one. “Oh five dash two—oooh! Almost!” he maneuvered behind the stacks, stepping into shadow. “Oh five dash…uh, it’s dark over here, I can’t read…what’s
THAT!
”

“They’re just boxes,” Liz tapped her foot.

“N-n-no!” Dillon stuttered. “There’s something back here and it’s, it’s staring at me! Oh God! It moved! It’s coming after me—HELP!”

He slipped and tripped out of the stockroom, screaming for his mommy.

Doug halted with a load on his handcart, looking at Liz. She didn’t appear amused at all.

“What the heck is back there?” she muttered. “Jack, you go look.”

“Mom!” he protested. Really, though, he wanted to see what had made Dillon so upset. He positioned himself alongside the stack of boxes, peering into the dim corner.

“I hear something,” he reported.

“What is it?” his mother moved closer.

“Can’t tell yet. But it’s something.”

He took two small steps and stooped. The hairs on his neck stood at attention. For some reason he didn’t sense fear, only excitement, while being transported to another place and time…