“Could be a trampoline,” Big Sissy Hotlegs said, carefully putting a paw on the disc.
“Why would they store a trampoline in a closet?” Chive Alpha said. “It’s a door.”
Big Sissy Hotlegs jumped on the disc, only going up about three feet up. “It isn’t a trampoline. I think it’s a door.”
“That’s what I said.”
“I love trampolines.” Big Sissy Hotlegs shook her head at the door in the floor.
Chomp Style scampered around the perimeter of the circle. “No human twigs or knots,” he said. He meant switches or buttons.
“How’s it open, then?” Cortez asked.
Chomp Style tapped the floor-door with a claw, and then licked it.
“No bark, bone, or stone I bit before,” he said.
“Time to change that,” I said.
Chomp Style braced his chin on the floor and carefully placed his front teeth against the metal. Then he bit. His head quivered and then…snap! A shard of Chompy’s tooth broke loose, flying off to the side. Chive Alpha snatched it out of the air with her tiny front paw and tossed it back. We’ve all snapped a front tooth a time or twelve. It’ll grow again.
“Husks and pebbles,” he said, licking the chipped spot. “Tougher than sewer pipe, this is. It might even be—”
He stopped, but we knew what he was going to say. Squirrel-proof. It’s not a real thing. It’s an idea made up to frighten kits into staying close to the nest.
We stared at this floor-door. This possibly squirrel-proof floor-door.
There was a moment of tense silence, and then Chive Alpha broke it.
“How did you keep the ham on your bum, Chomps?”
Chomp Style tucked the broken shard of tooth into his cheeks. “Underpants,” he said.
The five of us turned to look at the ground squirrel.
“Underpants?” he said. “You know, like regular pants, but smaller. And…under.”
“All squeaks in human-town know what underpants are,” Big Sissy Hotlegs said.
“Not me,” Chive Alpha said. “I need all the details, from root to leaf.”
“Well, see,” Chomp Style said, “the humans, they got bums, right?”
I twitched my tail. “She’s teasing you. The Chive knows what underpants are.”
“Aw, man,” Chive Alpha said. “I wanted him to go on about it.”
“Focus on the job,” I said.
High on the walls were square vents for the mall’s air-conditioning system. I flicked my tail.
“Yes, ma’am,” Chive Alpha said, scampering up the wall. She nipped a bit of metal off a grate and slipped inside. So kind of humans to create secret passages for squirrels in everything they build.
The rest of us watched the spot where she disappeared and then slowly turned back to look at Chomp Style.
“Underpants are the least of it,” Chomp Style said. “A squeak’ll do most anything to get rid of the fungus.”
Chive Alpha chittered from behind the grate of a different vent than the one she entered. “Like branchwork all inside out! Big hollow tree, vents going everywhere!”
“How about the roots?” I asked, twitching my tail at the “squirrel-proof” door. “The basement?”
“No,” Chive Alpha said, scampering down beside us. “Only trunk and branches. No roots. No basement.”
We all looked to the door in the floor that was made of something Chomp Style can’t bite through.
“Then where does that go?” Cortez asked.
“The door isn’t always the weakest point,” said Chomp Style, bending to the floor around the door.
“Wait,” I said. “Cortez, could you take a snuffle?”
She sniffed around the floor, back and forth in a grid pattern.
“Careful, Chomps,” she said. “Under the floor here, it smells like a wrong forest fire. Like lightning in an old shoe.”
I asked Chomp Style to go real slow, so he peeled a tiny spot layer by layer. In a people house, all we would have found was paint, drywall, cement, wood, and such. But here…
A reddish glow peeped through the hole.
“What is that?” I asked.
Cortez sniffed. “It’s hotter than fire, and it runs all over beneath this floor.”
Fire that didn’t burn the building? I sniffed and placed the smell: lasers.32
Outside the mall, a dog barked.
“Sir Woof,” Chive Alpha said.
In seconds we were out of the empty shop, through the empty mall, and on the other side of the wall-tunnel Chomp Style chewed.
Just as we escaped the parking lot and dove into the safety of the trees, another gray car parked near the others. A man got out, just like all the rest. This one looked around first. Looked hard.
We scampered away in silence. A silence once again broken by Chive Alpha.
“Is no one going to bring up how Chomp Style said—”
“We’ve put away all further talk about ham and underpants, Alpha,” I said. “Hoarded and sealed.”
“This is something else.”
I sighed. “Go ahead.”
“Chomps chittered about giving sewer pipe the gnaw! ‘Tougher than sewer pipe,’ he said.”
“That I did,” Chomp Style said.
“So, how do you know it’s tougher than sewer pipe?” Chive Alpha said. “There’s got to be some kind of story there.”
“There is, but it’s as messy as a litter of kits in a chocolate cake.”
The five headed on to the neighborhood park, chittering among themselves. I twitched my tail in a quick farewell and veered toward Doreen’s. She needed to know about the mystery of the missing basement.
“Wait,” said Squirrel Girl. “So is there a basement or not?”
“Chk-cht-chff.”
“The ‘squirrel-proof’ door goes down?” said Squirrel Girl. “But the ventilation system doesn’t?”
“Chit-chikka,” said Tippy-Toe.
“Well, you’re the expert,” said Squirrel Girl. “I personally have never crawled around inside the ventilation system of a building, and so I rely on your vast personal experience. Hmm, I wonder why the builders would do that.”
“Cheti-kit.”
“I’m not sure I follow. Hot ‘not-fire’ runs under the floor around the floor-door? Maybe hot water pipes?”
Tippy-Toe sneezed a negating sneeze.
“Huh. Curiouser and curiouser….”
The girl squirrel and the Squirrel Girl were perched in an elm tree on Oak Street. Its leaves had turned golden but not yet fallen, tapping in the breeze with a dry rhythm. The sound was eager, impatient, like fingers rubbing together. The foliage was dense enough in that dark evening to keep them hidden from spying eyes, especially any in, say, the little green house directly in front of them.
“Tippy-Toe, my friend, tell me your thoughts on this creepy little house here.”
Tippy-Toe twitched a whisker.
“Yeah, okay, it isn’t so creepy. But that’s her house, Tip. Ms. Schweinbein, the teacher who doesn’t like me. There’s just something off about her, you know?”
Tippy-Toe lifted her furry nose in the air. It twitched as she sniffed. She flicked her tail in the squirrel equivalent of a shrug.
“I don’t know, just an instinct,” said Squirrel Girl. “She treats Doreen-me super-weird. Like, why is she always hassling me-slash-her, right? Plus, she transferred randomly in the middle of the term, and coincidentally right after Mike Romanger was taken away by S.H.I.E.L.D. to some juvie for young Super Villains. I mean, if the kid I used to eat lunch with turned out to be a Super Villain, anyone could be. His parents worked for Hydra, you know. So what if Ms. Schweinbein—”
“Chek-chitta.”
“You’re right, her house doesn’t smell especially evil,” said Squirrel Girl. “In fact, it smells like…like dogs. And cats. And, I don’t know, maybe llamas? What do llamas smell like?”
“Chkt.”
“Like an ancient terror ready to
shed its skin and devour the world? How do you even—”
Tippy holds up a paw. “Chk. Cht-chikka.”
“Oh,” Squirrel Girl said. “They smell like goats. I misheard. You know, Ms. Schweinbein has a strong animal-y odor about her as well. Isn’t that curious?”
A face appeared at the window. Ms. Schweinbein’s pale, narrow face, looking out at the night with beady eyes.
Squirrel and girl both froze, still as prey. Squirrel Girl scanned the face in the window for any telltale signs of disguise or perhaps shape-shifting ability. All week in class, Ms. Schweinbein had been on Doreen’s tail.33 And all week, Squirrel Girl had become increasingly convinced that the woman was a Super Villain disguised as an English teacher.
Squirrel Girl wished she’d do something obviously evil super-quick and hopefully in full view. Doreen had told her parents she’d be home in an hour, and she still had to study for that Social Studies quiz.
Ms. Schweinbein squinted out at the dark. From behind the cover of leaves, Squirrel Girl squinted right back. Until the teacher snapped the curtains shut.
Squirrel Girl’s phone buzzed. Her special, hero-business-only phone that Ana Sofía had given her. She pulled it out of a pocket on her utility belt, hoping as always that maybe it was She-Hulk asking her out for smoothies sometime, which was a thing that hadn’t happened recently or actually ever but maybe could happen one day so why not hope for it every single time?
It was a text from Ana Sofía which, while not She-Hulk, was always welcome.
ANA SOFÍA
Check out this link.
The link took Squirrel Girl to a TuberTV video of Bryan from the mall rally. He was wearing a Chester Yard Mall T-shirt and cargo shorts and standing in front of the mall flanked by two teens. They also wore the Chester Yard Mall shirts, the girl in the orange “dog” variety and the boy in the yellow “cat” option.
BRYAN LAZARDO: Hey gang! Bryan Lazardo here, aka your pal Bry, PR guru for Chester Yard Mall. Chester Yard Mall—where the deals are apocalyptically good! I’m here with two youths of our community who are involved in getting the word out about our mall mascot competition. Alisha is Team Dog, and Connor is Team Cat. Can you tell our viewers why you’re—
CONNOR: Cats rule, dogs drool!
BRYAN LAZARDO: Oh my!
ALISHA: Real mature, Connor. You know that cats cause mental illness, right? They’re full of parasites that get inside your brain and give you disorders.
CONNOR: That’s canine propaganda! Cats are clean. Dogs are dirtier than a sewer.
BRYAN LAZARDO: Hahaha! I love the enthusiasm! I’ll give this one-hundred-dollar gift card to whichever of you can convince the other to vote for your candidate.
ALISHA: Cats are predators and they eat people in their sleep ALL THE TIME!
CONNOR: Dogs fart flesh-eating bacteria!
ALISHA: CATS CHEW ON—
CONNOR: DOGS ARE LITERALLY—
As the two kids continued to yell alternative dog and cat facts at each other, Bryan Lazardo kept tilting his head at the camera with a campy can-you-believe-this expression. When the shouting slowed down, he frowned at them both.
BRYAN LAZARDO: Don’t go fighting like cats and dogs, now.
He held up the gift card enticingly, and they started yelling at each other all over again.
“I don’t know about that dude,” said Squirrel Girl. “Seems like he wants people to fight. I’m not one to judge, Tippy-Toe, but I get the feeling I wouldn’t necessarily be lifelong buds with Bry.”
BRYAN LAZARDO: Before we end this riveting segment, we have one more guest. This young man received the golden T-shirt at our kickoff rally, thereby earning the honor of an appearance on our first video. Come right over here, champ. That’s it, where the camera can see you. Well, sport, anything to say?
MUNKEL: Um…I’m on Team Squirrel!
BRYAN LAZARD: Ha-ha-ha! You just never know what’s going to happen at the Chester Yard Mall! Come to the grand opening in just a few days!
“Aw, did you see that, Tip?” said Squirrel Girl. “That’s the boy with the awesome name whose life I miraculously saved one time from a horrible squishing death.”
“Chkkt-tat.”
“You’re right, he does seem like a bright kid.”
“Bright” was a thing Doreen’s parents always called her, too. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! And she’d believed them, until middle school.
Squirrel Girl opened up the text message field, her thumbs on her phone, nearly texting to Ana Sofía her suspicions about Ms. Schweinbein. But no. If she kept complaining about how her teacher didn’t like her, maybe Ana Sofía would start noticing that Doreen was unlikable and then she wouldn’t like her either and that would be catastrophe of the loneliest flavor.
Her phone buzzed with a new text.
ANA SOFÍA
The skunk club says someone from listless pines spraypainted a challenge on the high school to meet at mall lot tonight and squirrel scouts are headed there now
SQUIRREL GIRL
On it
Squirrel Girl leaped out of the tree, with a wistful backward glance at Ms. Schweinbein’s house.
“I’ll just have to expose her Super Villain secrets another day,” she told Tippy-Toe, who rode on her shoulder.
“Chek-kit,” Tippy-Toe said with complete confidence in her BHFF.
The mall was about twenty blocks away. Squirrel Girl hopped from rooftop to rooftop, and as she traveled, squirrels followed. First Tippy-Toe was joined by five other squirrels. And then more came. More squirrels and more squirrels, until a great flowing shape of them followed behind.
When they reached the last house on the block, Squirrel Girl chirped a warning, and the squirrels leaped onto her arms and back, riding as she soared over the street to the next block.
“Look, it’s Squirrel Girl!” she heard as she passed. Her tail was out and free; her name was semi-famous. She was Squirrel Girl, and everybody knew it.
Her heart pumped. The Social Studies quiz was forgotten.34
At the mall, she spied two groups gathered on the unpainted asphalt that would become the mall’s parking lot. In the glow of the orange security lights, she could make out one side wearing darker T-shirts than the other. Mall T-shirts. It was Cats vs. Dogs.
And they were howling and hissing at each other.
Also shouting insults and dubious facts about domesticated animals. But the howling and hissing was the most obnoxious part of it.
Squirrel Girl spotted Vin with some other Squirrel Scouts and hopped over to him.
“Squirrel Girl, I’m glad you’re here!” Vin said. “They’re saying really mean stuff about cats!”
“Okay,” said Squirrel Girl. “So, that’s not very nice, right?”
“It’s not!” said Vin. “We’re probably going to have to punch them.”
“Wait, what?”
“They’re being mean, so they must be villains, so they need to be punched!” Vin said boldly, then seemed to hear himself and had the grace to blush. “Um, I think things are getting out of control.”
Squirrel Girl spotted Antonio in front. He wore his dingy white baseball hat low over his eyes, his brown hair straight and shaggy. He took a step toward someone from Team Dog. And he lifted up a baseball bat.
“WHOA!” yelled Squirrel Girl. “Hey now! No weapons, friends. Let’s not be hasty—”
A rock whizzed past her, an inch from her head.
“Everyone needs to CALM THE FREAK DOWN!”
No reaction. Probably no one was listening to her. The whole talk-criminals-out-of-criming thing didn’t work unless they heard her.
She leaped over their heads and landed in the narrow space between the two groups. The squirrels followed, arranging themselves around her like her own furry shadow. She pulled the bat out of Antonio’s hands.
“Hey, I thought you were on our side!” he said.
“I’m on the side of you not getting killed or thrown in jail, Antonio, which me
ans yeah, I’m one hundred percent totally on your side.”
But the other Skunk Club members had bats, too. One had a heavy metal chain; someone else held a glass bottle. The LARPers were especially well armed with literal swords and bows with arrows.35
They were yelling at the Team Dog group and taking steps forward. She yanked away the glass bottle. Groups of squirrels leaped onto the bats and LARPer swords, their collective weight making the weapons too clumsy to wield, and they were forced to drop them.
“Hey!” the LARPers said.
“Sorry!” said Squirrel Girl. “I still like you! Let’s be friends!”
“They’re wide open now!” shouted a blond guy on Team Dog. He was gripping a bat. “Let’s get them!”
“Um…nope,” said Squirrel Girl.
As they rushed forward, the squirrel army picked up the fallen weapons and carried them out of the way of the mob. At the same time, Squirrel Girl swiped the Team Dog leader with her tail, knocking him down. She scurried, dodged, and slid around the front line of Team Dog, seizing any tools and weapons as she went and dropping them to waiting squirrels, who quickly carried them off.36
The Team Dog leader scrambled to his feet, his eyes blazing. He swung his fist to punch her. Which just seemed rude.
She dodged, grabbed his fist, and pushed up on his arm to vault herself onto his shoulders.
“Now listen up, everyone!” she said, from where she stood atop his shoulders.
The guy punched at her ankles. He jerked around, trying to knock her off. But her balance game, it was good.37
“Stop that,” she said, swiping his head with her tail. “I’m only going to be here for a minute.”
He still lurched around.
“JUST HOLD STILL!” she said.
She rapped him on his ear with one foot. He stopped lurching.
“Good boy. Okay, then. So, guys, this is all really silly, isn’t it?”
The mob stared at her.
“Um,” said a girl, “you mean how you’re standing on Geoff’s shoulders?”
“No, obviously this is a clever solution to the no-one-was-listening-to-me problem. I mean, all this fighting is silly!”