Kid vs. Squid Read Online Free Page A

Batman.
    Which I guess made me Robin.
    Nobody wants to be Robin.
    Just then a hideous growl echoed through the cabin. It was like a force of nature, deep and low and gurgly and unlike any beast I could imagine.
    It was my stomach.
    â€œSorry,” I whispered. “I skipped breakfast.”
    Trudy dug in her backpack and handed me a little plastic sandwich bag. It contained a sugar-glazed doughnut. “Eat it before your stomach gives us away.”
    I accepted the doughnut and looked upon Trudy with a little bit of awe. I couldn’t help but be impressed with her. Even Batman didn’t carry doughnuts.
    After making the doughnut disappear in three bites, I wiped my sugary fingers on my pants and continued on with Trudy.
    The footprints came up to a closed hatch, and now I got nervous. There’s something unsettling about opening closed doors without knowing what’s on the other side. But that’s what we’d come here to do. I bent down and pushed open the hatch cover.
    We crawled through into a cramped compartment, barely more than a closet, with a closed door on the other side. Mouthwatering smells of garlic and ginger and hot spices wafted over me. The walls were lined with shelves bearing bags of shrimp chips and flounder jerky, as well as jars containing fish the size of pocket combs, little squids and octopuses, and other, odder, pale creatures that looked as if they’d been dredged up from the same place as the exhibits in Griswald’s museum.
    â€œSomebody spends a lot of time here,” Trudy whispered. “Clearly, we’ve discovered our criminal’s secret lair.”
    And from the sounds of slurping I could hear coming from the other side of another narrow door, someone was home. I’d had enough skulking about. Through the door I went, and into a small galley with a sink, stove, and cupboards. Sitting at a table, drinking soup from a Thermos cup, was the thief from the night before. The
What-Is-It??
rested at her elbow beside salt and pepper shakers.
    â€œHey!” I shouted, rushing into the galley. “That’s my … thing!” I lunged for the
What-Is-It??
, startling the girl, but she recovered quickly. Grabbing the box and tucking it under her arm, she slid away from the table. The blade of a knife glinted in her hand.
    â€œBack off, land-dweller,” she hissed.
    I couldn’t place her accent. French? Chinese? Minnesotan? I’m not good with accents. Anyway, I was more focused on her knife.
    Trudy flipped open a notebook. She clicked a pen. “Your name, permanent address, and legal guardian, please?”
    â€œAttempt to wrest the head from me and I’ll gut you, girl,” snarled the thief.
    Trudy wrote something down and said, “You can try.”
    The thief only smiled.
    Things were getting a little crazy, what with the snarling and the threats and the knife. I wanted the
What-Is-It??
back, but I wasn’t sure a potential head-in-a-box was worth all this.
    Hoping to relieve the tension in the room, I cleared my throat and tried to think of a good distracting knock-knock joke.
    Then, behind me, someone else coughed. Not Trudy, not the girl-thief. This was a wet, shlurpy cough. “Ah, it’s the museum boy and the bookstore girl and Shoal the Flotsam,” a familiar voice said. “Give us the box, or we will kill you.”
    The BMX boys weren’t wearing their bandannas and sunglasses like they had on the beach, so I saw the white, oozy flesh of their faces. I saw their shiny black eyes, no bigger than dimes. Where their mouthsshould have been were puckered seams. It was as if they’d been interrupted while morphing from human to jellyfish.
    One of the jellies rushed me, his bare hands the color of snot.
    â€œDon’t let them touch you!” Shoal screamed.
    Before I could react, she jumped up on the table and used it as a launching pad to hurl herself at the jellies. She howled like a rabid