How to Tame a Human Tornado Read online

  Also by Paul Tobin

  How to Capture an Invisible Cat

  How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

  To Colleen Coover, and to every child with questions

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  I was on high alert.

  Ready for anything.

  It was the middle of the afternoon and I was in the center of the sidewalk in the heart of downtown Polt. There were people everywhere. Everyone else was walking casually, but I was on tiptoes, looking in all directions, and knowing that it was almost entirely useless.

  My phone rang.

  It was Nate.

  “Do you see him?” Nate asked.

  I looked around at all the people. There was a college-age couple walking by. He had huge sideburns and she had pigtails and they were looking at something together on her phone. There was a businessman in a striped suit, balanced on one foot, checking the bottom of his left shoe to see if he’d stepped in something unpleasant. There was a group of three high school boys kicking a soccer ball. There was a man with a remarkable mustache just ahead of me on the corner, holding a signboard advertisement for a mattress store, bellowing “hello” to everyone and trying to shake their hands. There was a very young girl holding her mother’s hand and earnestly explaining the differences between apes and monkeys. There was a woman trying to text with one hand while eating a meatball sandwich. Her blouse was white. She was holding the sandwich away from her, worried about stains.

  The meatballs smelled so good.

  “I don’t see him,” I told Nate, on the phone. “What should we—?”

  But it was at that moment I heard the roaring hum. The air began to vibrate. There were crackling noises from everywhere, like tinfoil being crunched. A Corgi began nervously barking. An old woman in a blue hat clutched a tiny dog to her chest, saying, “Hush, Jeremiah. Hush.” Even so, I could tell she was worried. The air didn’t feel right. There was . . . too much of it. Pigeons were suddenly flying away. A crow that was on the awning for the All-Winners Art Museum began cawing, hopping along the awning, head swiveling nervously. The hum was growing louder. The crackling rising in intensity.

  It felt like the whole world was starting to shiver.

  And then . . .

  . . . I saw him.

  He was only there for a second.

  Moving much too fast to see.

  He was a blurred line, a thousand flickering images, racing around everyone, racing past them, the air sizzling around him. A few bits of trash . . . newspapers and fast-food wrappers . . . simply burst into flame.

  The couple toppled over in the sudden gust of wind. Their shared phone dropped to the sidewalk, tumbling along, bouncing again and again, caught in the blustering wake. The businessman’s shoe was ripped off by the pure force, so that he was hopping on one foot, gazing around, bewildered. The high school boys were frowning at their soccer ball, which had popped from the intense air pressure. The woman with her meatball sandwich was looking at her blouse in horror, because it had been simply painted with meatball sauce in the sudden wind that’d lasted for less than a second, but had been faster than any tornado, stronger than any hurricane.

  The man with the signboard was frowning at it, clearly puzzled. The edges of his sign were tattered and smoldering. And . . . written on the sign with the remains of a meatball sandwich . . . it said, “Nate! Delphine! Help me! Please!”

  I looked down the street to where the blur had disappeared, then picked up my phone from where I’d dropped it in the sudden chaos.

  “Nate,” I said. “Chester was just here. We have to save him.”

  Two hours previously I’d been in the Next Page Bookstore on Trillip Avenue and Nate Bannister had been chastising a confused employee because the quantum physics section had fewer books than the one for celebrity diet tips. The clerk’s name was Lucy and she was at least thirty years old, meaning almost twenty years older than Nate and me, so you’d think she’d be wiser (my mother assures me that wisdom comes with experience), but Nate, as it so happens, is the smartest person on earth. His IQ is immeasurable. His hair is brown and flopping. There’s no connection between these two facts, at least I don’t think there is, though Nate says there’s a connection between ALL facts, if you know how to find them.

  Anyway, poor Lucy was just staring at Nate and his floppy brown hair, which he kept having to brush out from behind his glasses, because he has a big nose, meaning that it holds his glasses too far out from his face, meaning his hair can fall behind them. There is a connection between all these facts.

  “I was hoping you’d have Brinkman’s Theory of Transitive Kinetics in Orbital Molecular Vectoring,” Nate complained.

  “Maybe . . . we could order it?” Lucy said. Her blond hair was almost as curly as my red hair. She was tugging on a few strands, looking around in that manner people have when they think they’re being pranked. Her lips (she was wearing green lipstick, which made me jealous) kept squinching up like chewed bubblegum. There was a computer terminal just a few feet away, and she beckoned Nate and me closer to where she typed for a moment before saying, “Oh. Oh, wow.”

  “What?” Nate said.

  “That book is, like, really expensive.”

  “It is?” Nate asked, clearly disappointed. “But I’ve seen it listed for cheap. Only around four thousand dollars.”

  “Four thousand dollars is not cheap,” Lucy said. Her eyes were wide and her lips became chewed bubblegum again.

  “Knowledge is worth any price,” Nate said. “I’d like the signed copy, if one’s available. It doesn’t matter if it costs more.” He was taking his gold elephant credit card out from his wallet. It’s the rarest of credit cards, only three of them in the entire world, because Nate is apparently one of the richest people on earth, though he won’t tell me how rich. As for me, I have a part-time dog-walking job. I make seven dollars an hour. Per dog. Sometimes three or four dogs at a time. I do okay.

  “Here,” Nate said, holding up his credit card. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Uh, a shiny credit card?” Lucy said, clearly not impressed.

  But, then . . .

  “G-GOLD! G-g-gold ELEPHANT CARD!” the store manager shrieked, bellowing out from three aisles away. He not-very-adeptly leaped over a display of books on Greek mythology, scurried through an aisle of romance books, then skidded to a stop in front of Nate. He trembled. I thought he was going to salute.

  It was at that moment, when everybody else was watching the commotion, that I saw Bosper sneak in through the front door.

  Bosper is Nate’s Scottish terrier.

  Bosper is also the smartest mathematician in the world, excepting only Nate, and possibly Jakob Maculte, the leader of the Red Death Tea Society, a cult of super-smart villains who do super-evil things. Maculte’s top priority is to take over the world, and his credo is . . . Whatever works, as long as it’s EVIL. (I made that last part up, but it’s basically true.)

  Anyway, we weren’t talking about the Red Death Tea Society, even though Maculte had recently escaped from custody and was calling Nate multiple times every day, swearing all sorts of revenge, making an amazing array of threats, and sporadically inviting me over for tea, invitations which I have politely and not-so-politely declined.

  No. We were talking about dogs.

>   Nate’s dog, in particular.

  Bosper can talk.

  And he was not supposed to be in the store.

  Because he forgets he’s not supposed to talk when he’s in public.

  I had to do something.

  “Be right back,” I told Nate.

  “Oh, okay, Delphine,” he said. The bookstore manager was stupidly grinning at Nate and babbling about how it was an honor to have him in the store, meaning it was an honor to have a gold elephant card in the store. Some people are way into money. It’s kind of sad, really. They’re so focused on money, they miss the bigger questions in life, like . . . is there anything better than climbing a tree to watch a sunset with a friend? Or, why do some people think pie is better than cake? Or, of course . . . why was a talking dog sneaking into a bookstore?

  And Bosper was sneaking. No doubt about it. He was darting between bookcases, peering around them, acting like a spy. Like an especially incompetent spy. You know that thing in horror movies when people are scared of the monsters, so they tiptoe into rooms or along darkened corridors, but they never look up? That’s what Bosper was doing. Forgetting to look up. Which isn’t very smart if you happen to be a Scottish terrier and therefore only about a foot tall.

  I secretly started following him.

  It wasn’t very hard to do.

  All I had to do was stay behind the bookcases, one aisle over, because he was in the children’s picture book section where the shelves were only about three feet high. I could easily peer over them at Bosper.

  He was whispering, “The dog is quiet. No barking for Bosper! I am a sneaker.” I should’ve mentioned that while Bosper can do math and can also talk, he’s much better at math than he is at talking.

  I followed after him, keeping out of sight, listening to what he had to say.

  “No time for farting,” he said. “Because Bosper is a sneaky dog.” He stopped at the end of the aisle and looked left, and right, and then he farted.

  “This has happened and the dog has regrets,” he said. His tail slunk low. But, then he regained his composure and scurried forward as fast as he could, dodging a group of children looking through picture books, then skidding out on a tile walkway at the edge of the carpeted children’s area and thudding into a bookcase, knocking over a display of Robinson Crusoe books and a cardboard pirate ship.

  “The dog has tumbled,” Bosper said. “But no one has noticed.” This was decidedly untrue. Several first graders had been listening to a bookstore employee (Ms. Chrissy) reading from the Polka Dots vs. Angry Spots picture book, but had turned around to stare at the Scottish terrier. Those who were close enough had even heard Bosper speak. They were staring at one another in amazement, but it wasn’t very deep amazement, because first graders still believe that everything is possible and therefore aren’t too surprised when they hear a dog talk. I still remember being that age. It was fun. It was only later that I began to understand how the world works, and that dogs do not talk, which is why it was such a shock the first time I heard Bosper speaking on the day that I met Nate and discovered that everything was, in fact, possible.

  Bosper was again trotting through the bookstore. Now and then he would look back to make sure he wasn’t being followed, but he would always murmur, “Bosper is checking for spies,” before turning around, giving me ample time to hold a book in front of my legs so that Bosper wouldn’t recognize me. I wasn’t holding the books in front of my face, because Bosper still wasn’t looking up.

  We moved through all the math books, just an aisle away from where Nate was talking with the store manager. Bosper pawed at some of the books, whispering about “inter-universal Teichmüller theory,” but then moved on.

  I followed him through the romance section.

  And the section for westerns.

  And into world history.

  I was only a few feet behind him when he turned into an aisle, let out a happy yelp, and said, “The dog discovers you! His tail goes wagging!”

  I couldn’t see who he was talking to.

  I edged closer.

  I was in a shelving area for bookstore merchandise. There were various coffee cups and water bottles and shirts emblazoned with the store logo, as well as other items like action figures of famous authors and an assortment of calendars, including a display calendar turned to the proper date.

  Saturday the fourteenth.

  Wait.

  What?

  Uh-oh.

  I’d lost track of time again, and since it was Saturday the fourteenth that meant that Nate had done three dumb things yesterday. That’s what he does. Dumb things. Every Friday the thirteenth. He’s explained to me that since he’s so intelligent, things rarely come as a surprise to him. He’s figured out all of life’s equations, all of the various probabilities, and so on. It’s exciting for him to solve problems, to make incredibly accurate predictions, but at the same time it bores him, because everything moves steadily along a path that his amazing brain has already predetermined. Because of this, he plays with the equations. What I mean is that he messes them up.

  He does three dumb things.

  Every Friday the thirteenth.

  The first time I met him he’d transformed his mother’s cat into a dangerous giant. At other times he’s taught the orangutans at the zoo how to build skateboards, taught a mouse how to sword-fight, and accidentally unleashed a swarm of robot bees.

  I heard a small noise at my feet.

  A tiny thump.

  Looking down, I saw one of Nate’s notes, the ones he leaves in places where he predicts I’ll be. I had to make a decision: either sneak around the corner to see who Bosper was talking with, or read the note. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a major decision, because I was shivering with anticipation about discovering Bosper’s secret, but this was no ordinary day. This was one day after Nate had, without doubt, done three incredibly dumb things.

  I leaned over and picked up the note . . .

  . . . just as Bosper peered around the corner.

  Meaning that our faces were at equal levels, and the terrier didn’t need to look up in order to recognize me anymore.

  “Delphine?” Bosper said.

  That’s my name. Delphine. Delphine Cooper.

  “Bosper,” I said. “Why are you here?”

  “Bosper is not here,” he said in a solemn voice. His eyes keenly searched mine, hoping I would believe him. Whatever he saw in my eyes wasn’t belief (it was much closer to disbelief, and also dizziness, because I’d been bending over for far too long), and so he abandoned that tactic and enacted one of the most commonplace plans in all of history for when things are going wrong.

  He ran.

  I looked around the corner to see who he’d been talking with, but there was no one, and Bosper was already gone and the note was just burning in my fingers, so I shrugged and opened the note, which was folded in an intricate pattern so that when I unfolded it there was a pop-up swan with my name on it, followed by, “Don’t be mad.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  I unfolded the note a little more.

  It read,

  "You forgot that yesterday was Friday the thirteenth, but by now you'll have remembered, and you'll be wondering what I've done. So I thought I'd tell you. If you promise not to be mad."

  I unfolded the note some more.

  But there was nothing. No more words.

  I looked around for more notes.

  Nothing.

  I stared at the note, reading it again. The last sentence was underlined. I glared at it. It said,

  "If you promise not to be mad."

  “Piffle,” I said. “I won’t promise not to be mad.” As soon as I spoke, the line wavered, and the underlining faded away.

  A folded note fell on my head, bouncing off my hair onto a shelf in front of me. It said,

  "Delphine."

  Unfolding it, I read,

  "You probably noticed how the underlining on that previous note disappeared. Th
at's because you said the words 'promise not to be mad,' which means I'm safe, because you promised."

  “How did you know I said that?” I whispered, not mentioning how I’d only almost-but-not-quite said that. Then, with a thought, I added, “Wait. How did a note know that I said that?”

  Another note fell on my head. I looked up this time before grabbing the note. I didn’t see any more notes lurking above me. Still, I moved a step to the right.

  The new note said,

  "The previous note was on a type of touch paper that I've invented. It's like a touch pad, except it's paper, and it was able to measure the wind currents caused by the pronunciation of certain words, like 'promise,' and 'not' and 'mad.' So when you said them, the note knew to trigger the next stage. You should look at the original note now."

  I picked up the original note, where there was now more writing. It was a thankfully short list of the dumb things Nate had done the previous day.

  ONE: I made some mini-ostriches.

  TWO: I invented an infallible truth-telling serum.

  THREE: I took all the science vials out of my book bag and hid them around town.

  “You hid what?” I hissed, looking at the last entry. “Nate, those things are dangerous!” Nate’s “science vials” are almost like magic potions, or pills that have incredible side effects, such as invisibility, or chameleon powers, or having lightning breath, the last one of which sounds so dangerous that I’ve always been too afraid to even ask.

  “Oh, Nate,” I whispered. “You just can’t have scattered these around Polt. This could be catastrophic!”

  Another note fell on my head.

  It said,

  "I know. Really dumb, right? I feel pretty good about it, too! Also, nearly ninety percent of people step to the right in order to avoid perceived danger, so it made it easy to predict that you would step to the right to avoid any more notes."

  I swiveled in place and stomped off in the opposite direction, entirely ignoring how three notes fell to the floor behind me, and how another one dropped in front of my face.

  “Nate!” I almost-nearly-shouted as I stomped closer to him. “Did you really leave your science potions all over town?”