OKAY, SO WE’VE established that there was absolutely no way, no how, no chance on this earth that I would even think about entering the Shark Bay/Hills Valley Art Prize.
And on Tuesday morning that’s exactly what I didn’t do—think.
Without knowing how, but most likely by Ms. Donatello’s sneaky use of some evil alien mind-meld thing, I found myself bundling up my best drawings and sketchbooks, putting them into a folder, taking them into school, walking to the judging room, and submitting my drawings to the art prize committee.
As I closed the door on my way out, everything seemed to get sharper and clearer, as though the entire morning had taken place underwater. Ms. Donatello’s mind-melding juju must have been more powerful than I thought.
It didn’t really matter, though, I reflected on my way back to class. There was no way on earth I’d win. Stuff like that doesn’t happen to me. Rafe Khatchadorian is the kid who gets busted, the kid who stuffs things up, the kid who is stalked by Miller the Killer through the halls of Hills Valley, the kid who, above all else, fails.
But perhaps there was an alignment of the planets or something—Mars rising above Uranus, or the Mayan calendar readjusting—because … I won.
That’s correct. A trip to Australia, all expenses paid! An exhibition in Shark Bay! Best of all, THREE WEEKS OFF SCHOOL!
Khatchadorian shoots! He scores! He WINS! Is there nothing this kid can’t do?
And then I remembered something. Something that put a crimp in my plans, something that meant the trip Down Under couldn’t happen.
“You remembered the sharks, didn’t you?” Leo said. Leo is sharp like that. He always knows exactly what I’m thinking, which isn’t surprising since he lives inside my head.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And the snakes and spiders and crocodiles and jellyfish and octopus.”
Leo shrugged. “You could always stay out of the ocean.”
I was about to say what a dumb idea that was when I realized that Leo was right. I could stay out of the ocean. I can’t remember hearing about anyone being eaten by a Great White while skateboarding. Staying out of the ocean would reduce my chances of being eaten by a Great White by at least 100 percent. I liked those odds a whole bunch better. It would mean abandoning my surfing plans, but you can’t have everything.
“The snakes and spiders are probably not as bad as the Discovery Channel made out,” Leo said. “TV exaggerates things, like, a million billion times.”
Leo was right again. I was probably making too much of the creepy-crawlies. They were bugs. Okay, they might be bugs the size of a spaniel, and they might carry enough venom to stun a polar bear, but they were still just bugs. And what was the chance of actually meeting a snake?
“And if you still think Australia’s too scary you could always say no,” Leo said. “Hand back the prize.”
Hand back the prize? I froze. Leo had a point.
A really stupid point.
“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled. “I won something! Me! There’s no way I’m handing that back. Are you kidding? Australia, dude! Sun, beaches, first-class plane tickets, surfing, girls, koala bears, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, my very own exhibition, the Opera House!”
“Because you really like opera.”
“I’m on a roll, Leo, and the only thing you can do when you’re on a roll is—”
“Put butter on it?”
“Go with the flow!”
Leo looked puzzled. “How does that work? Going with the flow and being on a roll? Like, wouldn’t you—”
“Don’t worry about all that! I won. We’re going. Everything’s coming up roses for Rafe Khatchadorian!”
Now, hold up, Khatchadorian! How is it that five minutes ago you were bleating about sharks and spiders and all that stuff, then—bingo!—now you’re rolling over like a puppy getting its tummy rubbed and accepting the prize! What gives?
I’ll tell you what gives, readers: Success!
It’s not something I’ve had much of these past few years and now that things are going well for me—for once—I’m not about to let that go by. I might look stupid but I’m not that stupid.
People are noticing me now. Jeanne Galletta said I looked “interesting” in math class yesterday.
Earl O’Reilly told Mom that Hills Valley was very proud of me and that he was sure I’d do a great job of representing us to Austria and that I should be sure to get some good skiing in while I was over there (I think Earl may have some work to do on his geography skills). The Hills Valley Sentinel was even planning to do a story on me. On ME! I’m in the big leagues, baby!
Of all the reasons for going to Australia, though, the one that meant the most was my mom smiling so much when I told her that I thought her face would break.
“Rafe, you star!” she yelled, and gave me a great big embarrassing mom hug in the middle of Swifty’s (the diner she works at). “My own little Picasso!”
I was going to make a joke about Picasso but I didn’t want to ruin the moment. Plus, Mom would have grounded me.
And the sharks? I’ll figure that out once I get over there.
I SHOULD HAVE known there’d be a catch. A big Mom-shaped catch. “Of course I’m coming with you. If you think they’d let someone your age fly halfway around the world and hang out in a foreign country alone, then you have another think coming, mister!”
Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. In fact, just as Mom handed out this shocking bit of news, a feather from a passing mutant albatross hit me on the shoulder and I went down like a boxer in the tenth round.
Okay, I might have been exaggerating that albatross thing a little—in the sense that it didn’t happen—but you have to cut me some slack here. Finding out that Mom was coming with me Down Under was a heavy blow.
When you’re my age, going anywhere with your mom—even if she’s a good one like mine—is about as uncool as you can possibly get. Had I really imagined she’d let me fly solo halfway around the world and hang out alone in a foreign country doing exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, and where I wanted?
You bet!
When Mom broke the terrible, terrible news that she was going to be coming with me, I didn’t lie around whining—I stood up to do my whining like a man! I whined in the living room, I whined in the lounge, and I whined in the kitchen. I whined before breakfast and I whined at dinner.
I whined from dawn to dusk with scarcely a break for breathing. I whined like no kid has ever whined before.
And I didn’t restrict myself to whining. I moaned, pleaded, begged, sulked, shouted and whimpered … all producing exactly zero results. I even pulled out my secret weapon and gave Mom the full-beam patented Khatchadorian Death Stare which has been known to cut a hole in two-inch titanium, but Mom just asked me if I had something in my eye and to quit blocking the TV.
I cut my losses and stomped off to my room and stayed there for a long, long time.
By the eve of The Trip, I had adapted to the idea of being papoose boy Down Under. It wasn’t like I was happy about it, but I had moved on from whine to whatever.
After a restless night plagued by croc-infested dreams, I woke at dawn. I already felt jet-lagged and I hadn’t even gotten out of bed.
I’ll spare you all the details about Mom wailing like a wounded hyena when saying goodbye to Georgia and Grandma Dotty. It was gross. There was enough salt water splashing about to fill the Hills Valley Municipal Swimming Pool with plenty left over but, eventually, we got on the plane. That’s when we noticed that Earl and the Mayor hadn’t exactly splashed out on the plane tickets.
But despite the plane, and despite Mom coming along, I decided I was just going to enjoy Australia. I wedged myself happily into the window seat and watched the Pacific unfurl below me. I was a new Rafe Khatchadorian, a globetrotting Rafe Khatchadorian, an internationally famous artist Rafe Khatchadorian.
It would be fine. What could possibly go wrong?
I WAS RIGHT on the crest
of The Beast—a wave so big that some of the surf pros were having second thoughts about going back out again.
The seatbelt light pinged and I woke up sweating like a pizza-munching pig in a sauna.
I think I may have been talking in my sleep because I noticed a couple of passengers with their fingers hovering over the FLIGHT ATTENDANT button on their armrests. I shifted slightly in my seat.
“Quit moving around so much,” Mom hissed, clutching my arm. “You’ll make the plane wobble.”
I glanced at her tray table. Did I mention she’s not a good flyer? No? Okay, well the truth is that she is possibly The Most Nervous Passenger in The History of Flying.
Spread out across her table was a rabbit’s foot, a four-leaf clover, a Bible, a copy of the Qur’an, a sprig of heather, a string of prayer beads, a silver cross of St. Christopher, two sick bags, a “lucky” pebble shaped like Minnesota that Mom had found in the yard, a laminated copy of the plane safety features, a bottle of AbsoCalm travel pills, a book by Dr. Enrique Meloma titled Don’t Freak Out at 35,000 Feet Ever Again!, and a picture of the Dalai Lama.
I looked out of the window and immediately forgot all about my dream. (That’s right, that wave and shark stuff was all a dream. I won’t do it again, promise.) The plane was coming in low over a perfect blue sea. We’d arrived in Australia and it was all I could do to stay in my seat.
As we touched down and coasted alongside a strip of trees that lined the edge of the bay, I pressed my nose against the window and caught a glimpse of something furry moving in the upper branches. I looked closer and saw a flash of light as the sun winked off the creature’s eyes. I swear it was staring at me.
“Did you see that?” I said to Mom, but she had her eyes screwed shut and her hands clamped so tightly on the armrests that it was a miracle they were still in one piece. “Mom! I saw something in the trees!”
A deep voice came from behind my left shoulder and I jumped about six feet. It was the man in the row behind me, leaning forward.
“You saw something, son?” he said with a strong Australian accent. His face was leathery, and his blond hair was greying at the sides. He had the air of a man who wrestled crocodiles for fun.
I nodded. “In the trees.”
“Drop bears,” the man said gravely.
I saw the woman next to him glance at him quickly. “Terry …” she said.
“The boy’s got to know, Shirl,” the man said in a voice that came all the way from down in his boots. “He’s a visitor to our country.”
Shirl shook her head and turned back to her magazine.
The man leaned forward as the plane taxied toward the terminal. His voice dropped to a whisper. “That was a drop bear you saw, son.”
“A drop bear?” I said. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“That’s what they want,” the man replied, although he never said who this mysterious “they” were. “Drop bears are the most dangerous animal in Australia. They call ’em koalas to throw you off the trail. I used to hunt them on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Every night they’d climb up there and cling to the steel—they like the warmth, you see—and every now and again one would drop down to hunt. They kill hundreds every year. Just drop down and rip out their brains while they’re still alive. Horrible, it is, just horrible.”
“Hundreds of what?” I gasped. “What do they kill?” The Discovery Channel had obviously missed something out in their research.
There was a pause before he spoke, like he was weighing up whether or not to give me some very bad news. “Tourists,” the man growled. “They feed on tourists, son.”
I gasped. I was a tourist.
“That’s enough, Terry,” Shirl said.
The plane came to a halt and the UNFASTEN SEATBELT sign pinged on.
Terry unbuckled his seatbelt, his face grim. “You take care, sonny,” he said. “Watch the skies and remember to take precautions.”
“What sort of precautions?” I asked, but he’d gone.
AUSTRALIA IS HOT.
Like, REALLY hot. Frying-eggs-on-the-sidewalk hot. Ice-cream-melting-before-you-can-take-the-first-lick hot. Did I mention it was hot?
It was so hot that all thoughts of drop bears vanished. Having my brains sucked out and eaten would be the least of my problems. I’d be boiled alive long before that happened.
Hey, Hills Valley has had hot days—plenty of them—but there was one small but VERY important detail I had forgotten. While it was winter back home, here in Upside-Down Land it was most definitely summer.
“This is nice,” Mom said, smiling.
I looked at her like she’d gone crazy. Somehow, between leaving the plane and getting outside, and without me noticing a thing, she had magically changed into light summer clothes. How do they do that? Moms, I mean.
“Nice?” I replied, my voice dripping with acid. “Nice?”
I had expected Australia to be warm, but this was something else. People needed Special Forces training to deal with this kind of thing. How did Australians stop themselves from melting? Did they have some sort of force field? Ice water running through their veins? Skin like elephant hide? Whatever it was, I needed to find out—and soon.
To make matters worse, the airline had lost our bags.
“Once we find ’em we’ll send ’em up to Shark Bay,” the smiling, blond surfer-type guy said from behind the desk. “She’ll be right, mate.”1
What I found out in Australia was that quite often things did not turn out right but—and this is the important thing to remember—it never stops them from saying it. Be warned. And, no, I don’t know why it’s always “she” who’ll be right and not “he”. It just is.
The second thing that happened (after losing our bags) was that the trip north to Shark Bay was going to take SEVEN HOURS.
On a bus with a malfunctioning air-con.
Seven.
HOURS.
A TV at the front of the bus was switched to the news. The grinning anchorman proudly told us that Australia was experiencing one of the hottest days on record with the mercury nudging 46 degrees Celsius. The guy sounded proud, like it was something to boast about.
“That’s one hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit!” I gasped. “Seven hours without air-con?” I asked the driver.
“She’ll be right, mate,” he replied, smiling like a chimpanzee with a caffeine problem.
See?
I’ll spare you the full horror of the journey.
All you need to know is that at one point a bug as big as a bear flew across my face and, instead of screaming like a normal person, I was just grateful for the breeze.
When we arrived at our first rest stop, I staggered down the steps of the bus. Wherever we’d stopped was hotter than Sydney. I was literally melting.
I was about to complain, but after seeing Mom’s jet-lagged expression, I stopped melting and got back on the bus. Moms can do that—stop people from melting, I mean.
At least I didn’t see any more drop bears in the trees. It was probably too hot, even for them.
WHEN THE BUS arrived in Shark Bay, the boiling day had curdled into a full-scale thunderstorm. Rain of biblical proportions hammered down on the roof of the bus.
I gazed out the window and nudged Mom. “Look at that.”
Outside, palm trees were bending in the wind. It was like the news footage you see when Channel Z is reporting from Miami or Haiti. I saw a small car tumbling through the air followed by a pizza shop and what looked like a whole herd of cows.
Okay, I made that last bit up. But it did look bad.
“I hope it’s not a hurricane,” Mom said. She leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “This isn’t a hurricane or something we should be worried about, is it?” She paused, then added, “We’re American.”
“Nah, just a bit of a breeze,” the bus driver said. “Anyway, we don’t believe in hurricanes. In Australia we have cyclones.”
“Isn’t a cyclone just another name for a
hurricane?” I asked.
My nights in front of the Discovery Channel had included plenty of stuff on typhoons, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornadoes. I was something of an expert now.
“Nah,” the driver said, looking at me as if I was nuts. “Totally different thing. She’ll be right, mate.”
“What about those hailstones?” Mom said.
“Those itty-bitty little specks of ice? Completely flamin’ harmless! Now get off me flamin’ bus, ya drongos!”
The bus driver skidded to a halt in what looked like the parking lot of a fried chicken joint in Hills Valley. The rain had turned to hail and we made a run for a bus shelter. We had gone from super-hot to ice-cold in less than two minutes. We had clearly found ourselves in the middle of some enormous natural disaster.
The bus driver had obviously escaped from a mental-health facility. What he’d done with the real bus driver I didn’t like to think about. The best we could hope for was that our water-logged bodies would be found wedged in the branches of a tree a week later during the massive clean-up operation.
Over the noise of the hailstones hammering down, Mom told me that Mayor Coogan’s brother, Biff, was supposed to meet us. I leaned against a graffiti-covered wall and looked out at the curtain of hail.
‘This isn’t what I’d imagined,’ I said, but Mom wasn’t listening.
She was fast asleep.
AFTER WHAT SEEMED like hours, but was actually six minutes and eighteen seconds, a car screeched into the parking lot and slid to a halt in front of the bus shelter. A man-sized chicken sprang out of the driver’s seat and stood looking at us as hailstones the size of tennis balls bounced off his head as though they were made of popcorn.