Dodger and Me Read Free

around in there for fifteen solid minutes without seeing any sign of the path. This was ridiculous: The whole stupid forest was only four blocks on a side, so how could I have walked that long without hitting an edge? I sat down on a rock to think, but as soon as I stopped making noise, I started hearing lots of scary sounds all around me. First I noticed a constant buzzing that was probably coming from hives of killer bees. Then I tuned in to a whistling noise that was coming from either the wind in the trees or a vicious bear with asthma. Finally, there was a crunching sound off in the distance, which could have been a lot of things, none of them good.
    The noises got me so freaked out that I put my dorky padded batting helmet back on to shield me from the sounds (and the bees and the wheezing bears). I panicked anyway and started running through the underbrush as fast as I could. Sticks and branches were ripping at my arms and legs, cold sweat was pouring down my face, and I wasn’t even trying to pretend I had a plan anymore. Fear had completely taken over, and I was running for dear life.

    To this day, I don’t know how long my sprint lasted, but I know I didn’t stop until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I doubled over, put my hands on my knees, and gasped for air until I felt calmer. Then I straightened up and looked around. Without noticing, I had made my way into a sunny little clearing, which wasn’t scary at all, just surprisingly blue. There was a bluebird singing from the top of a blueberry bush, and a little stream with clear blue water ran right through the middle of the sunniest patch and past some bluebell flowers before disappearing back into the forest. Only one thing ruined the entire scene: A crumpled red, yellow, and white fast-food bag was lying halfway in the water.
    I was disgusted. Here was the only pretty place in the whole spooky forest, and some idiot had hiked in here just to dump his garbage smack-dab in the middle of it. I took a deep breath, sighed, and started to turn away. But then for some reason I stared at the paper bag in the stream some more. It was just so … wrong … that I couldn’t stand to leave it there. Even though my mom has always warned me never to pick up trash from the
ground, because “you never know where that thing has been,” I walked over to the bag and lifted it slowly out of the water. The bottom was a soggy mess, and I was afraid it would rip, so I forced myself to slip one hand underneath. Now I was holding the bag just under my nose and started to feel a sneeze coming on. I noticed that there was some kind of blue pollen sprinkled all over the top side of the bag, so without thinking, I rubbed it off with my free hand.
    All of a sudden, the bag started wriggling and bouncing around in my hands. I dropped it and jumped back. When I looked down, I could see that the bag was gone, and a strange-looking teapot was lying on its side in the grass. The teapot was swaying back and forth, and I had the terrifying thought that something was trying to fight its way out.
    My terrifying thought was absolutely correct. As I watched, too scared to move, a furry blue hand shoved its way out of the pot’s spout. The fingers clawed their way along the ground, and as they moved forward, they dragged an entire furry blue arm out of the spout behind them. Next
came a painfully tilted furry blue neck and head, followed by another arm. As the arms began pushing downward on the ground, a hairy blue chest and stomach squeezed out of the teapot. At this point, I was staring at what appeared to be the upper half of a full-size, furry blue chimpanzee, which had somehow emerged from a teapot—a teapot that had somehow been a fast-food bag just moments before.
    No wonder my mom always tells me the woods are bad news.
    Just then the blue chimp-thing turned its head to look at me, and I saw that it was sporting a rather alarming black patch over its