How to Properly Dispose of Planet Earth Read online

  For my parents, Louise and Dominique Paul Noth

  Also by Paul Noth

  How to Sell Your Family to the Aliens

  CONTENTS

  Part One: “Surrender, Happy!”

  Chapter One. The Possibilities

  Chapter Two. Actually …

  Chapter Three. Alice’s Brother

  Chapter Four. The Silver Snake Ring

  Chapter Five. Lizardini

  Chapter Six. Never Everly

  Chapter Seven. Asteroidini

  Chapter Eight. The Fruit Fly

  Chapter Nine. The Beckoning Flipper

  Chapter Ten. Dimitrius

  Chapter Eleven. Roll Call

  Chapter Twelve. Owl-Headed Crystal Monsters

  Chapter Thirteen. The Torn Paper

  Part Two: The Black Hole

  Chapter Fourteen. Blind Spot

  Chapter Fifteen. Like an Arrow

  Chapter Sixteen. The Hot Seat

  Chapter Seventeen. My Big Superpower

  Chapter Eighteen. Catching Up with Pete

  Chapter Nineteen. Gossip

  Chapter Twenty. The Yellow Backpack

  Chapter Twenty-One. The Switch

  Chapter Twenty-Two. When Sisters Fight

  Chapter Twenty-Three. Music Class

  Part Three: Captivity

  Chapter Twenty-Four. The Ouroboros

  Chapter Twenty-Five. Kayla’s Note

  Chapter Twenty-Six. The Imperial Planet

  Chapter Twenty-Seven. The Protocol

  Chapter Twenty-Eight. In the Dock

  Chapter Twenty-Nine. Blood Room

  PART 1

  “SURRENDER, HAPPY!”

  CHAPTER 1

  THE POSSIBILITIES

  I, Happy Conklin Jr., am now eleven. Over the past year I’ve learned a lot about what’s possible and what’s not …

  Why was asking Nev Everly to be my lab partner so impossible? Because my mouth refused to talk to her and my brain turned to useless goulash in her presence.

  I didn’t realize Nev’s effect on me the first time I saw her. I only noticed that a smiling girl with long brown hair stood in front of our homeroom. Her vintage clothes made it seem like she had wandered in out of an old Hollywood movie.

  “Class,” said Ms. York. “We have a new student. Nevada, would you like to introduce yourself to the class?”

  “Not really,” said Nev.

  I laughed.

  I overheard her say two more things that made me laugh in our first-hour science class.

  She’s funny, I thought. You’re funny too. You should ask her to be your lab partner.

  So I walked up to her to introduce myself.

  Then I walked past her.

  I ended up in the back of the room sharpening a pencil.

  At lunch that day, I stood in line behind a talkative kid named Felix, who for some reason always called me by my last name, Conklin.

  “Actually, Conklin …,” Felix was saying.

  Nev Everly got into the lunch line right behind me.

  “Hi!” said Felix. “You’re actually the new girl! I’m Felix.”

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Nev.”

  “So, actually …,” said Felix, “do you want me to show you around the cafeteria?”

  “I’ve been in a cafeteria before,” said Nev.

  I pretended not to know Felix.

  “This is my buddy Conklin,” he said, putting his arm around me.

  “Hi,” said Nev.

  That’s when my brain melted into goulash.

  I said nothing. I only stared at her.

  “Conklin and I both have lizards,” said Felix.

  “Huh,” said Nev.

  “It’s actually true,” said Felix, looking at me. “You know, come to think of it, Conklin, since we both have lizards, we should be lab partners in science class. We could actually do a lizard science project! How awesome would that be?”

  As Felix worked himself into a lather about all the reptile experiments we could do together, I fought back the urge to knock him on the head with my lunch tray.

  CHAPTER 2

  ACTUALLY …

  Felix had attached himself to me on the first day of sixth grade. He seemed to want to be my best friend but also to correct every word that came out of my mouth.

  “Actually, Conklin,” he’d say, “it’s pronounced ‘orangu-TAN,’ not ‘orangu-TANG.’ ”

  “Actually, Conklin,” he’d say seconds later. “Chimpanzees aren’t monkeys, they’re great apes.”

  “Actually, Conklin … Actually, Conklin … Actually, Conklin …”

  I don’t mind being corrected when I’m wrong, but Felix racked up at least fifty Actually, Conklins on any given school day.

  And after the first twenty, you start to feel like an idiot.

  Felix also tended to speak at great length about his favorite subject, the digestive troubles of his pet lizard, the Mighty Thor.

  After a few months of this, I made the mistake of telling him that I, too, had a pet lizard, by the name of Squeep!

  “Actually, Conklin?” said Felix. “We both have lizards? Get out. What are the friggin’ odds?”

  Why had I ever mentioned Squeep! or called him my “pet lizard”?

  That wasn’t accurate.

  Squeep! was nobody’s pet, and he hadn’t been a proper lizard ever since Alice stole him and stashed him in the Doorganizer, an infinite closet powered by a black hole.

  This journey through extra-dimensional space-time had altered Squeep! in profound and disturbing ways.

  Sure, he still looked like a lizard, but he acted more like an ambassador from another dimension. He seemed to have diplomatic immunity to our laws of physics. He’d escape from wherever I put him and show up wherever I least expected, sometimes only seconds later.

  He’d moved out of his terrarium at my old elementary school, which was understandable. Once you’ve lived in a black hole and crisscrossed the galaxy, who could go back to sitting on a rock and eating bugs all day? Besides, a new lizard named Pete had replaced him as the class pet. So Squeep! decided to move in with me. Most mornings I awoke to find him sleeping on my forehead or chest.

  He wasn’t so much a “pet” as a “scaly roommate who slept on my head.”

  I preferred Squeep! to any normal pet.

  Normal pet lizards need to be fed, cared for, and cleaned up after. They’re also—if you believe Felix—prone to constipation. The Mighty Thor could only poop in a warm-water bath. Felix said his family was always arguing about whose turn it was to “poop the lizard.”

  Thankfully, Squeep! preferred finding his own food, and I never had to worry about how he went to the bathroom, except when I accidentally walked in on him.

  But I didn’t like Squeep!’s constant disappearing and reappearing. I called it his Lizardini routine, after the famous escape artist Harry Lizardini.

  It unnerved me whenever he pulled a Lizardini, but especially the time I discovered him inside my school locker. He sat in the upper compartment, staring at me. He refused to come out.

  After some coaxing, I tried closing the locker door, just to show him I meant business. But when I reopened it a moment later, Squeep! had vanished, leaving behind a single gray seashell. I spent the rest of the day scratching my head about how and why he had done that.

  I began noticing other little “parting gifts” that Squeep! would leave for me whenever he disappeared: the seashell, a nacho chip, a bottle cap.

  It felt like he was trying to tell me something with these little doodads.

  But what?

  I even started a “Doodad Decoder” in the back of my pre-algebra notebo
ok to figure out what each one meant.

  CHAPTER 3

  ALICE’S BROTHER

  Before Nev showed up, my confidence at school had improved a lot, ever since the incident with the aliens last year.

  After surviving that traumatic ordeal, getting teased by fifth graders no longer bothered me. It took more than being called “Beard Boy” to hurt my feelings.

  When I stopped crying, the Make-Beard-Boy-Cry Dance seemed kind of pointless to everyone.

  I even started getting along with some of the other kids, though not Willow Johansen. She never forgave me for ruining the dance she invented.

  But still, I had reason to hope that Wonder Street Middle School would be a fresh start.

  Then, on my first day of sixth grade, some seventh-grade boy started picking on me in the hallway.

  “Hey, Dinky!” he yelled, walking toward me. His friend, who looked frightened, grabbed him by the shoulder and said two words:

  “Alice’s brother.”

  The kid who’d called me Dinky froze. The color fell from his face.

  “Sorry,” he croaked.

  They both backed away as though I were a stray pit bull foaming at the mouth.

  Wherever I went that morning, a whispered “Alice’s brother” echoed among the big kids as they took frightened, furtive glances at me.

  That afternoon, I couldn’t find the gym, so I walked up to this giant kid to ask for directions. He must have been an eighth grader because that’s as high as the school went, though he looked about nineteen. He wore a varsity football jersey. Number 07.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  Glancing down at me, his eyes popped open like he’d been electrically shocked.

  He took a wallet out of his pocket and threw it at me.

  “Just take it!” he screamed, and ran away.

  I chased after him to give him his wallet back, which only scared him more. Looking back in horror, he took off like a rhino and left me in the dust.

  Not knowing what else to do, I carried his wallet to the school office and told them that I had found it on the floor. The secretaries and an assistant principal began close-talking and sneaking looks at me. I heard the same echoing whisper:

  “Alice’s brother … that’s Alice’s brother.”

  Adults too? How could grown-ups be afraid of Alice, an eighth-grade girl? I asked my little sister Kayla—who knows everything—about it after school.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Alice hasn’t had the Doorganizer for months, but everyone still acts like she’s all-powerful.”

  “She still has her reputation,” said Kayla.

  “But what are the adults so afraid of?” I asked.

  “Blackmail,” said Kayla.

  “Blackmail?” I said. “Who’s Alice blackmailing?”

  “Whoever she has to,” said Kayla. “How do you think she got away with thieving for so long? By stealing information too. She’s got everyone’s secrets in her head, to use as kompromat. She knows things about Principal Kellogg that would curl your hair.”

  I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.

  Alice would come and go from school, right in front of the security guards, whenever she pleased. I once saw her walk out of the teacher’s lounge drinking a soda she had gotten from their vending machine!

  As “Alice’s brother,” I found that I could get away with things too. I tried not to take advantage of this, but sometimes it was irresistible. Like if I saw an older kid picking on a fellow sixth grader, I could be a big hero just by strolling up and saying, “Is there a problem here?”

  The bully would squeak an apology and flee, leaving my fellow sixth graders baffled. Most of them had known me since kindergarten. No one had ever been afraid of Happy Conklin Jr.

  What had changed over the summer?

  Someone started the rumor that I’d become a karate master.

  Okay, I started that rumor. I’m not proud of it.

  No sooner had I started enjoying my new charmed life than something happened to burst my bubble. Mr. Jamneky, a math teacher new to the school, gave me a C in pre-algebra. My dad freaked out.

  When Dad was my age he was doing advanced calculus, so he expected far greater things from me than Cs in pre-algebra.

  I guess I should have spent more time in class taking notes and less time working on the Doodad Decoder in the back of my notebook.

  But the doodads were so much more interesting.

  Squeep! had continued to leave them behind whenever he disappeared. In addition to the seashell, the nacho chip, and the bottle cap, he now sometimes left a quarter and a chocolate Easter egg. These last two always appeared together.

  What on earth did that mean?

  Then came the silver snake ring.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE SILVER SNAKE RING

  Squeep! and I lounged on the living room carpet, half listening to my sister Beth as she taught Baby Lu about Genghis Khan.

  Baby Lu loved being read to so much that she would sit still for almost anything. This allowed Beth to babysit while also studying for her ninth-grade Civilizations exam.

  “Genghis Khan,” read Beth, “and his Mongolian horde of mounted archers swept through Asia, slaughtering over one-tenth of the people on Earth and conquering nearly one-quarter of the land. His was the most violent reign in all human history …”

  Baby Lu looked fascinated.

  When I turned back to Squeep!, he had vanished.

  In his place on the carpet gleamed a silver ring. I picked it up and brought it to the window for a better look.

  Its heaviness on my palm gave me a spooky yet familiar feeling.

  I knew this ring from somewhere.

  The silver had been forged into the shape of a snake biting its own tail. Its red gemstone eyes so captivated my attention that I failed to notice the approach of Eliza, Beth’s twin sister.

  “Whoa!” said Eliza, snatching the ring from my hand. “This is Grandma’s! Where did you find Grandma’s ring?”

  “It was right here on the carpet,” I said truthfully, though I didn’t say anything about Squeep!

  “It’s the Ouroboros,” said Eliza. “The symbol of eternal return. Maybe it means … Grandma’s coming back.”

  Her mouth fell open into a smile as her eyes glimmered down at the circular serpent.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It must mean Grandma’s coming back. What else could it mean? Beth, Grandma’s coming back!”

  Beth gave me a worried look.

  We didn’t share Eliza’s enthusiasm for Grandma.

  If you read my last book, you’ll know why Grandma wasn’t our favorite person.

  She wasn’t the FBI’s favorite person either. She’d been at the top of their Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for a year now. We still had federal agents in black SUVs staking out our apartment in case she returned.

  She was, however, Eliza’s favorite person. Because Eliza actually believed her ridiculous promises. See, Grandma had this lunatic plan to take over the galaxy. She said that if we helped her we would each be given our own solar system to rule over as queens and kings.

  Insane? Absolutely. But Eliza believed every word of it. She spent idle hours daydreaming about her future kingdom.

  “We’ve got to get ready,” said Eliza breathlessly. “We’ve got to be ready for her return. Grandma’s coming back!”

  “If Grandma ever does come back,” I said, “they’ll lock her up for breaking every law in the book.”

  “When Grandma comes back,” said Eliza, fitting the ring onto her own finger, “she will be the only law.”

  These words sent a shiver down me timbers. Grandma was scary! I dreaded her return. And I hated the idea of her having anything to do with Squeep!’s disappearances and the weird doodads he left behind.

  CHAPTER 5

  LIZARDINI

  Squeep! stayed disappeared for a few days, until I awoke one morning to find him sleeping on my head.

 
; Felix had been pestering me about getting started on our science project, so I decided to act right away, before Squeep! vanished again.

  I built a lizard carrier out of an old bowling ball bag and some mesh material, so Squeep! could breathe. I zipped him inside and carried him the three and a half blocks to Felix’s house to meet the Mighty Thor.

  “Actually, Conklin,” said Felix, greeting me at his front door, “I was starting to wonder about you.”

  “Hey, Felix,” I said.

  I followed him up the stairs and into his bedroom, where the Mighty Thor sat looking bloated in a glass terrarium.

  To my surprise, Felix had pictures of my dad, Hap Conklin Sr., on his wall. He had taped up articles about Dad’s scientific breakthroughs and advertisements for his old inventions like Hap Conklin’s Buns of Abs, and Clockos, “the only frozen taco that tells the time.”

  “Well, Conklin,” said Felix. “Can I actually meet Squeep! now?”

  I opened my lizard carrier to take him out, but all I found inside was a small gray seashell.

  “What’s that?” said Felix.

  “Uh … a shell,” I said.

  “I can see that it’s a shell,” said Felix. “Where’s your lizard?”

  “He escaped,” I said.

  “Sure he escaped,” said Felix, shaking his head.

  “He must have,” I said.

  “Be honest, Conklin,” said Felix. “You don’t actually have a lizard, do you?”

  “Why would I lie about having a lizard?”

  “To impress me,” said Felix. “I tell you about my lizard. You want to be cool too, so you say, ‘Oh, I have a lizard!’ when all you actually have is a seashell in a bowling ball bag.”

  “But I do really have a lizard,” I said.

  He gave me a pitying look.

  “Sorry, Conklin,” he said. “But I can’t actually be your lab partner.”

  “What? How come?”

  “I only asked you because I thought you might actually be smart, like your dad, which you’re clearly not.”