He Laughed With His Other Mouths Read online

  The crowd gaped. You could have heard a pin drop.

  Jasper smiled. “So. We just flick on the nuclear reactor here . . . and . . . voilà!”

  The machine started to chug. Jasper Dash picked up the headset and fitted it on over his mouth and one ear. With a great deal of drama, he extended one finger. He reached toward the dial.

  He cranked the dial around, and it sprang back in a circle, rattling. He did this several times. Then he waited.

  The whole crowd waited: girls with sarcastic expressions, mothers with strollers, grandmothers in pleated jeans, a few soccer jocks who hated dorks like Jasper Dash, antsy brainiacs, and Lily, who couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. All of them stared.

  And the phone on the lunchroom wall rang.

  Mr. Krome looked over at it, annoyed.

  It rang again. And again.

  “Pick it up!” said Jasper, delighted.

  Mr. Krome walked over and got the phone.

  Jasper said, “Mr. Krome? It’s me! Calling . . . from the first—the very first—fully mobile telephone!” He waved at the principal across the room. “See? See this? You just drag this cart with you, and occasionally put in some uranium ingots, and you can make calls—to anywhere within this town!” He was practically crowing with pride.

  People were perplexed. Then they were surprised. Had he really invented a mobile phone the size of a truck?

  People coughed. They exchanged winks with one another. The school jerks started snickering. Then other people laughed quietly.

  Lily’s heart sank. She saw the crowd chuckling. She saw kids pointing at Jasper and whispering.

  Jasper was not always aware of what was going on in the world around him. He came from a different, older America, and did not understand the modern world very well—which is surprising, considering that he thought only of the future.

  But he understood he had done something wrong.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. Now he could almost not be heard over the laughter. He was blushing. “You don’t understand! This phone has its own engine! It’s not hard to pull! It will drive right beside you!” He took a few steps and the contraption chugged along beside him, clanking like roadwork.

  Kids only laughed harder.

  “No! Wait!” he said.

  Lily couldn’t stand that he kept going. She wanted to tell him to stop. He was no longer blushing. He was as pale as a ghost, because there was no blood left in his face.

  Jasper insisted, “Look! We’ll call the mayor! With our fully mobile telephone! I have the number right here!”

  “Shut up!” yelled one of the school jerks. “Take a seat, flyboy!”

  “Lily!” called Jasper desperately. “I’m going to make the call! Start shoveling atomic fuel!” He dialed the phone.

  Lily loyally opened the little door with the atom on it. She took a shovel and scooped pellets from the uranium scuttle into the hopper.

  She could hear people say, “Who is he, anyway?” “This is stupid.” “He’s in some kind of old-timey books. They’re really dumb and boring.”

  Lily glared out at the crowd as she fed the nuclear reactor. She glanced at Jasper’s face. She could tell he’d heard every word. He had turned away from the crowd. He was almost crying. He still had on the headset.

  “Mr. Mayor?” she heard him say, hopefully. “Are you there? . . . You are? . . . Yes, I’m at the Pelt Science Fair, and I wonder whether you’d tell the great people of Pelt that—”

  “I know where you are,” said the mayor, standing right behind Jasper. “I’m here to see my daughter explain how a rainbow works. You called my cell.”

  Jasper turned, astonished. He saw the glowing thing in the mayor’s hand.

  At that, he staggered backward.

  “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my. All of you . . . already have . . . ?”

  Lily stopped shoveling. She bit her lip and hid behind her bangs.

  The mayor nodded. He patted Jasper on the shoulder. He walked away.

  The school jerks walked over from their cheese molecule and began kicking the machine’s wheels. They began pushing it back and forth and screeching around corners. Jasper didn’t even notice. He didn’t even move.

  Lily stood next to him.

  “This is the last straw,” he said. “I wish I could just disappear.”

  He did not know, but he would soon get his wish.

  “I guess,” he said sadly, “that maybe instead, I should have showed them my matter transporter that can take a man instantaneously to the stars.”

  * * *

  I Not available in stores near you. Not available at your favorite online retailer. Available only at church rummage sales, usually stuffed in boxes under an old brass chandelier and some knitwear, next to the bag of mildewed finger puppets. You move aside the dusty chandelier, and there’s this book from the 1930s or 1940s, and on the cover is a blond-haired boy full of pluck and adventure. He’s running away from some gunmen side by side with a robot. The robot looks dumb and old-fashioned. It is built entirely from metal boxes, with a stupid-looking face on it. In fact, the robot looks so dumb that you feel bad for it. You know that it doesn’t know how dumb it looks. It kind of breaks your heart. You don’t want anyone else to laugh at the robot. So you actually pick up the book and you pay the church ladies ten cents for it, and then you look and see that there are more books from the series, and you pay ten cents for them, too. You are on vacation, and you figure that it somehow feels right to be reading oldy-timey books in the little house your family is renting by the lake, where the loons call at night and motorboats skip along the flat water by day.

  When you get back to your family’s car, you have a rumpled paper grocery bag full of Jasper Dash books. They smell like mold. Everyone looks at you like you were crazy to buy them. Crinkling up the top of the bag, you realize you are probably never going to bother to read them, not in a thousand years.

  II In Jasper Dash #63: Jasper Dash and the Hyperspace Naptime.

  St Norman’s Episcopal Church

  Annual Summer

  YOUR SOURCE FOR: Old Nightstands! Side Tables! Unmatched Silverware! Half a Girl’s Bike! Barbies Missing One High-Heel Shoe! O’Dermott’s Restaurant Kidz Meal Novelty Drinking Glasses (featuring Frank the Fry-O-Later Gator)! And plenty of books from the old Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut Series, including: Jasper Dash on Explosion Island! Jasper Dash on the Trail of the Star Chompers! Jasper Dash and His Remarkable Electron Rattle! Jasper Dash and the Lost Bayou Friend Boat Mystery—Under the Sea! Guarantee: These books have not been read by anybody for a long, long, long time! Or touched!

  Also available: Several volumes in the Horror Hollow Series, starring Katie Mulligan, including A Week at Camp Rot-Grub, Morning of the Mutants, and Monster Spit III: Hock a Loogie from Beyond.

  THE FUTURE IS OVER

  Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, was slumped on a couch. He and Lily were at his home of the future. It was a house made of concrete and plate glass and huge circular balconies and spiral staircases. It was supposed to be a home of the future, but it was now from a future that was far in the past. The Dashes’ place had been designed and built many, many years before, so the concrete was cracking and the glass panels were sometimes streaked and fogged where water had gotten in between the panes. There was a weird smell in the upstairs closets that never went away.

  Lily couldn’t stand to see Jasper so upset. Normally, he wasn’t like this. He usually didn’t even notice setbacks, but strutted forward, eyes gleaming. He had been imprisoned in ice caves in Siberia and had been hung upside down in an Albanian gangster’s lair. He had escaped diamond smugglers in the Congo and flesh-eating firemen on one of the moons of Saturn.I

  “Jasper,” said Lily, “I know it felt bad, but everyone’s going to forget about it. They were laughing with you, not at you.”

  “I’m a fool,” said Jasper. “The world has moved on past me.”

  “You’re not a fool!” said Lily.
“Who else in the school has invented an atomic-powered cellular telephone?”

  “Nothing I do works out anymore. My hovering restaurant was hit by lightning. My mining ray caused the Halt ’n’ Buy parking lot to collapse into a sinkhole. My flying Sky Suite fell and crushed a hotel in Delaware. My rocket-powered car can’t go faster than twenty-five miles per hour.”

  “Yes, it can!”

  “I can’t drive it anyway, because I’m still not old enough to have a license.” Jasper turned over on his back. “I’m not complaining, Lily. I’m just saying I don’t belong in this world anymore. I’m from a different time.”

  “We’re calling Katie. She always knows how to cheer you up.” Lily reached into her pocket to get her phone, then stopped herself. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She pulled her hand out and pretended to fix her bangs. “Um, Jasper, do you maybe have a phone I could use?”

  He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, just use the one in your pocket, Lily. It’s no use trying to make me feel better.” He flipped over onto his stomach. “Where is Katie, anyway?”

  “Some Horror Hollow problem,” said Lily. “Conjoined twin serial killers. She was really sorry she couldn’t be here.”

  Katie Mulligan, like Jasper Dash, was the heroine of her own old book series. As you may have noticed, in the town of Pelt, there were many washed-up characters from old series, which was one of the reasons Lily loved living there. There were the Manley Boys, well-built sons of ace detective Bark Manley, who solved mysteries. There was that lovable pooch Terence, a hyperintelligent cocker spaniel–poodle mix, who was always up to adorable mischief. There were some old, fat Photon Rangers who walked around in uniforms that looked like footie pajamas. And of course there were the Cutesy Dell Twins, two girls who always had crushes on hot guys and spent long hours asking each other, “I know he likes me—but does he, like, like like me?”

  Katie Mulligan’s series, Horrow Hollow, had first come out in the 1990s, and it featured Katie being haunted, kidnapped, threatened, chased, lifted, dangled, dropped, and almost burned alive by creepy enemies. But she gave as good as she got. Hardly a month went by when she wasn’t slapping tiny little dragons with her flip-flop or reading spells backward to vanquish mean genies.

  She was always there for her friends, though. She showed up pretty soon at Jasper’s house, sweating from biking over and from fighting off the conjoined twin psychopaths.II She took off her winter coat and her hat. Her hair was flattened and smeared all over her forehead.

  “Why, Katie, it’s awfully kind of you to bike over,” said Jasper. “How is it going with the conjoined serial killers?”

  “Sorry I’m late!” said Katie. “It’s been a tough mystery. Two sets of fingerprints, but only one set of footprints, you know?”

  She scampered up the concrete stairs and playfully boxed with Jasper’s limp arm. “What’s happening, Jas?”

  “I am done.”

  Katie blinked with surprise. “Whoa! What’s wrong? Lily told me the science fair didn’t go so good, but, uh . . . What about all your pluck and vim and vigor?”

  Jasper slowly sat up. “My pluck has been plucked.”

  “What do you mean by ’done’?”

  He said dismally, “When I began my adventures a long time ago, there were no computers. Airplanes were still new. Plastic was still thrilling. Astronomers had just discovered Pluto, the ninth and coldest planet in the solar system.”

  Katie plopped down next to him on the couch and slung her arm around his shoulders. “Um,” she said, “hate to tell you, but Pluto: no longer a planet.”

  “What?”

  “They de-made it a planet. They decided it wasn’t planety enough. We only have eight again now.”

  “See?” groaned Jasper. “Do you know how proud the Plutonians were, the day I told them they had just been declared the ninth world in our solar system? There were parades in gratitude to all earthlings, and they made a statue of a human in one of their public parks. They showered it with confetti of ice that fell glinting in the starlight. They all gave speeches about unity and brotherhood and ate huge festival salads garnished with fungi from Yuggoth.”

  “Ja-a-a-a-a-asper!” Katie said, jerking her friend’s whole body back and forth. “Snap out of it!”

  “Everything I know is gone.”

  Lily asked him carefully, “What did you mean earlier when you said you were working on some kind of teleporter that would take people to the stars? Usually, you use rockets.”

  Katie added, “You like the roar.”

  Jasper shrugged. It looked like he didn’t want to talk about it. He just said, “Oh . . . It was just an . . . idea I had. . . . Something I’ve been tinkering with . . . Nothing much.”

  Katie said, “Huh! You never mentioned it before.”

  Jasper looked down at their feet. “I just . . . I got the idea for it recently. In the middle of the night. You know, chums. Suddenly you wake up, and there’s this whole idea in your head for an invention, and, Eureka! So I started building it. . . . It’s really nothing. . . .”

  “Wow,” said Katie. “Can you just go anywhere? Instantly? And there, suddenly, you are, at the beach in California?”

  Somewhat wearily, Jasper explained, “No. You have to have a teleporter booth to land in as well as one to send you. They send you back and forth.”

  “Isn’t that kind of a pain?” Katie asked. “To have two booths?”

  “Umm,” Lily pointed out, “otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get back. You’d appear on the beach in California and you’d have to drive back home.”

  “Good point,” said Katie. “But how are you going to find teleportation booths on other planets?”

  Jasper didn’t look right at them. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just . . . I had a dream, that if I built this teleporter booth . . . maybe there would be someone . . . who could . . . you know . . . receive me. I just felt like I had to . . . try it.”

  Lily said, “But you wouldn’t go away to another planet without us, right? Your friends?”

  Jasper smiled weakly. “Of course not, Lily,” he said.

  But he didn’t look like he meant it.

  Lily and Katie were worried about him. When it was time for dinner, they didn’t go home. Lily whispered to Mrs. Dash, “Would you mind if we maybe could stay for dinner? Jasper’s really upset, and we want to try to be here for him.”

  “Why, of course, honey,” said Mrs. Dash. “Thank you for thinking of it. I’d be delighted.”

  They ate a solemn dinner, and then Katie asked if they could hang out and watch a movie, but of course the only movies Jasper had at his house were old celluloid movies on huge reels. The movies had to be projected onto a screen. They watched a few from his collection.

  That didn’t help. There in black and white was Jasper Dash in 1942, looking just the same as he looked now, climbing into a plane and waving. There he was shutting the hatch on his Bullet Submersible. There he was playing Frisbee with a robot dog who had long since rusted.

  Jasper’s face fell as he watched the movies. Lily could tell he remembered what it was like back then when there was so much still to be explored and discovered in the world. She could tell he remembered what it was like to be inventing things, to be building, full of joy and hope in the future. And now the future had arrived and had passed, and it was over.

  She and Katie were quiet when they left. They said they’d see him in the morning.

  In fact, they would not.

  Jasper stared out the windows at the distant stars of the Milky Way. His breath spread and shrank on the plate glass.

  His mother was watching him, leaning against a pillar.

  “Jasper?” she said. “I know there are times we don’t seem to fit in here.”

  Jasper nodded.

  She asked him, “Is there anything I can do, honey?”

  He didn’t answer. He said, “Mother . . . What do you know about my father?”

 
“Who do you mean?”

  “The one who sent the beam through space. From the region of the Horsehead Nebula.”

  “Do you think of that as your father, buttercup? It was just some alien.”

  “You never . . . met him . . . did you?”

  “Of course not. And it might not have been a him or a her. I was just sitting at the observatory one night, looking through the telescope, when—goodness gracious me!—a tremendous beam of brilliant energy shot through the lens. My hair stuck straight out. Darling, I lit up like a chafing dish of flaming bananas Foster. I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes were filled with ones and zeros.” Dolores Dash crossed her arms. More quietly, she said, “When I woke up, everything was dark. I got up and went to tell the other astronomers what had happened. I slept on a cot right there at the laboratory so some of the medical scientists could keep an eye on me.

  “In the morning, I got up, ate a full breakfast of eggs and bacon, and discovered that, well, I was still absolutely famished. I realized I wanted to drink specific chemicals, things I never would have thought of normally. Lots of them. I went down to the chemistry lab. I filled up test tubes with electrolytes and amino acids and powders and, goodness, who knows what all. I had very definite ideas. I kept mixing things up and drinking them down. They were delicious. I just knew what to do because of that beam of energy. And somehow, Jasper . . . my boy . . . my perfect, special boy . . . somehow, all those swizzled acids turned into you.” She smiled at him and held out her hand for him to take it. “Jasper?” she said.

  He frowned and focused on the carpet.

  “I’m sorry, Jasper. I’m sorry we’re alone. Is there anything I can do?”

  He shook his head. “I’m going up to my laboratory,” he said.

  She tried to make conversation. “What are you working on?”

  “A transporter . . . to take people to other stars.”