Escape to Australia Read online

  Lots and lots and lots of sharks. Tiger sharks, bull sharks, makos, hammerheads, blues, and the big daddy of them all—the shark that gives me nightmares—the great white.

  Nothing on earth could have ever persuaded me to set foot in Australia.

  “They have sharks in America, too, dummy,” Leo said.

  “Not in Hills Village, they don’t,” I replied.

  It was like the whole ecosystem had been designed by a complete nutzoid with a really twisted sense of humor. As far as I could tell, Australia was basically an island full of monsters.

  “Man, that is one scary place!” I muttered, and switched the channel to something more soothing—a show about a friendly neighborhood serial killer.

  THAT OLD DONATELLO CHARM

  Okay, so we’ve established that there was absolutely no way, no how, no chance on this earth that I would ever even think about entering the Shark’s Bay/Hills Village Art Competition.

  And on Tuesday morning that’s exactly what I didn’t do—think.

  Without knowing why (and most likely because Ms. Donatello used some kind of sneaky alien brainwashing device), I found myself bundling up my best drawings and my sketchbook, putting them into a folder, taking them in to school, walking to the judging room, and submitting my drawings to the art competition committee.

  As I closed the door on my way out, everything seemed to get sharper and clearer, as though the entire morning had taken place underwater. Ms. Donatello’s secret brainwashing device must have been more powerful than I realized.

  It doesn’t really matter, though, I thought on my way back to class. There was no way on earth I’d win. Stuff like that doesn’t happen to me. Rafe Khatchadorian is the kid who gets busted, the kid who messes things up, the kid who’s stalked by Miller the Killer through the halls of Hills Village, the kid who, above everything else, fails.

  But maybe there was an alignment of the planets or something, because…I won.

  That’s right.

  A trip to Australia, all expenses paid! An exhibition in Shark’s Bay! Best of all, THREE WEEKS OFF FROM SCHOOL!

  Khatchadorian shoots! He scores! He WINS! Is there anything this kid can’t do?

  And then I remembered something. Something that terrified me. Something that threw a 2,400-pound wrench in my plans. Something that meant the trip Down Under would definitely not be happening.

  “You’re remembering the sharks, aren’t you?” Leo said. Leo is sharp like that. He always knows exactly what I’m thinking, which isn’t that surprising, since he lives inside my head.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And the snakes and spiders and crocodiles and jellyfish and octopuses.” I shivered.

  Leo shrugged. “You could always stay out of the ocean.”

  I was about to say what a dumb idea that was when I realized that Leo was right. I could stay out of the ocean! I couldn’t remember hearing about anyone being eaten by a great white while skateboarding on land. Staying out of the ocean would reduce my chances of being chomped by at least 100 percent. I liked those odds a whole lot better. It would mean abandoning my plans to learn how to surf, but sometimes you can’t have everything.

  “The snakes and spiders probably aren’t as bad as the Discovery Channel says,” Leo said. “TV exaggerates things, like, a million billion times.”

  Leo was right again. I was probably making too much of the creepy-crawlies. I mean, they were just bugs. (Well, they might be bugs the size of a spaniel, and they might carry enough venom to knock out a polar bear, but they were still just bugs.) And besides, what was the chance I’d actually get bitten by a venomous snake or accidentally eat a poisonous fruit?

  “If you still think Australia’s too scary, you could always say no,” Leo said. “Give back the prize.”

  Give back the prize? I froze. Leo had a point.

  A really stupid point.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I yelled. “I won something! Me! There’s no way I’m handing that back. Are you kidding? Australia, dude! Sun, beaches, first-class plane tickets, surfing, girls, koala bears, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, my very own exhibition, the Opera House!”

  “Because you really like opera.”

  “I’m on a roll, Leo, and the only thing you can do when you’re on a roll is—”

  “Put butter on it?”

  “Go with the flow!”

  Leo looked puzzled. “How does that work? Going with the flow and being on a roll? Like, wouldn’t you—”

  “Don’t worry about all that! I won. We’re going. Things are finally going right for Rafe Khatchadorian!”

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up, Khatchadorian. How is it that five minutes ago you were yelling about sharks and spiders and all that stuff, then—bingo!—you’re suddenly rolling over like a puppy getting its tummy rubbed and accepting the prize? What gives?

  I’ll tell you what gives: success!

  It’s not something I’ve had much of these past few years, and now that things were going well for me—for once—I wasn’t about to let opportunity pass me by. I’m not that stupid.

  Besides, people were noticing me now more than ever. Jeanne Galletta said I looked “happy” in math class yesterday. Me! Happy in math class!

  Earl O’Reilly, the contest’s sponsor, told Mom that Hills Village was very proud of me and that he was sure I’d do a great job of representing us in Austria and that I should get some good skiing in while I was over there. (I think Earl may have some work to do on his geography skills.) The Hills Village Sentinel was even planning to do a story on me. I’m officially in the big leagues, baby!

  Of all the reasons for going to Australia, though, the best one was the look on my mom’s face when I told her I won the contest. She was smiling so much that I thought her face would break.

  “Rafe, you’re amazing!” she yelled, and gave me a great big embarrassing Mom Hug right in the middle of Swifty’s, the diner she works at. “My own little Picasso!”

  And the sharks? I guess I’ll figure that out once I get there.

  MUTANT ALBATROSS FEATHERS

  I should have known there’d be a catch. A big Mom-shaped catch.

  “Of course I’m coming with you. If you think they’d let someone your age fly halfway around the world and hang out in a foreign country alone, then you have another think coming, mister!”

  Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. In fact, just as Mom doled out this shocking news, a feather from a passing mutant albatross hit me on the shoulder and I went down like a boxer in the tenth round. KO!

  Okay, I might be exaggerating a little—in the sense that it didn’t actually happen—but you have to cut me some slack here. Finding out that Mom was coming with me Down Under was a big blow!

  When you’re my age, going anywhere with your mom—even if she’s an awesome one like mine—is about as uncool as you can possibly get. Did I really think she’d let me fly solo halfway around the world and hang out alone in a foreign country doing exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, and where I wanted?

  You bet!

  So when Mom broke the news that she was going to be coming with me, I didn’t lie around whining—I stood up and did my whining like a man! I whined in the living room, I whined in the dining room, and I whined in the kitchen. I whined before breakfast and I whined at dinner.

  I whined from dawn till dusk with hardly a break for breathing. I whined like no kid has ever whined before.

  And I didn’t restrict myself to whining. I moaned, pleaded, begged, sulked, shouted, and whimpered… all of which produced exactly zero results. I even pulled out my secret weapon—the patented full-beam Khatchadorian Death Stare, which has been known to laser a hole in two-inch titanium—but Mom just asked me if I had something in my eye and told me to quit blocking the TV.

  Eventually, by the night before the trip, I got used to the idea of Mom coming with me to Australia. It wasn’t like I was happy about it, but I moved on from whine to whatever.

  After
a restless night plagued by crocodile-infested dreams, I woke at dawn. I already felt jet-lagged and I hadn’t even gotten out of bed.

  I’ll spare you all the details about Mom wailing like a wounded whale when she said good-bye to Georgia and Grandma Dotty at the airport. It was gross. There was enough salt water splashing around to fill the Hills Village Municipal Swimming Pool, with plenty left over. But finally, after fifty million hugs and sniffles, we were all set to board the plane. That’s when we found out that Earl O’Reilly and Mayor Coogan didn’t exactly go premium on the plane tickets.

  But despite the super-cramped seats and the bumpy ride, and despite Mom coming along, I decided I was just going to enjoy this free vacation to the other side of the world. I wedged myself into the window seat and watched the Pacific unfurl below me. I was a new Rafe Khatchadorian, a globe-trotting, internationally famous artist.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  THE BEAST

  I was right on the crest of the Beast—a wave so big that some of the surf pros were having second thoughts about going back out into the swells again.

  But not me. I waved to them as they stared at me from shore, amazed at my graceful glide along the craziest wave they’d ever seen. One cute surfer girl waved back, so I did a quick backflip to show her that I wasn’t afraid. That’s when the Beast rose even higher and started crashing down over me, pulling me under and—PING!

  The seat belt light went on and I woke up sweating like a hot-sauce-slurping pig in a sauna.

  “Quit moving around so much,” Mom hissed, clutching my arm. “You’ll make the plane wobble.”

  Did I mention she’s not a good flyer? Actually, she is possibly the Most Nervous Passenger in the History of Flying.

  I glanced at her tray table. Spread out across it was a rabbit’s foot, a four-leaf clover, a Bible, a copy of the Koran, a sprig of heather, a string of prayer beads, a silver cross of Saint Christopher, two barf bags, a “lucky” pebble shaped like Minnesota that she had found in the yard, a booklet about the plane’s safety features, a bottle of motion-sickness pills, a book by Dr. Enrique Meloma titled Don’t Freak Out at 35,000 Feet Ever Again!, and a laminated picture of the Dalai Lama.

  I looked out of the window and immediately forgot all about my dream. The plane was coming in low over a perfect blue sea. We were arriving in Australia and it was all I could do to stay in my seat.

  As we touched down and coasted alongside a strip of trees that lined the edge of the bay, I pressed my nose against the window and caught a glimpse of something furry moving in the upper branches. I looked closer and saw a flash of light as the sun winked off the creature’s eyes. I swear it was staring at me.

  “Did you see that?” I said to Mom, but she had her eyes screwed shut and her hands clamped so tightly on the armrests that it was a miracle they weren’t broken yet. “Mom! I saw something in the trees!”

  A deep voice came from behind my left shoulder and I jumped about six feet. It was the man in the row behind me, leaning forward.

  “You saw something, son?” he said with a strong Australian accent. His face was leathery brown, and his blond hair was graying at the sides. He had the air of a man who wrestled crocodiles for fun.

  I nodded. “In the trees.”

  “Drop bears,” the man said gravely.

  I saw the woman next to him glance at him quickly. “Terry…,” she said.

  “The boy’s got to know, Shirl,” the man said in a voice that came all the way from down in his boots. “He’s a visitor to our country.”

  Shirl shook her head and turned back to her magazine.

  The man leaned forward as the plane taxied toward the terminal. His voice dropped to a whisper. “That was a drop bear you saw, son.”

  “A drop bear?” I said. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Exactly. That’s what they want,” the man replied. “Drop bears are the most dangerous animals in Australia. They call ’em koalas to throw you off the trail. I used to hunt them on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Every night they’d climb up there and cling to the steel—they like the warmth, you see—and every now and again one would drop down to hunt. They kill hundreds every year. Just drop down and rip out their brains while they’re still alive. Horrible, it is, just horrible.”

  “Hundreds of what?” I gasped. “What do they kill?” The Discovery Channel had obviously missed something in its research.

  There was a pause before he spoke, like he was weighing whether or not to give me some very bad news. “Tourists,” the man growled. “They feed on tourists, son.”

  Oh, no.

  I was a tourist.

  “That’s enough, Terry,” Shirl said.

  The plane came to a halt and the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign pinged off.

  Terry unbuckled his seat belt, his face grim. “You take care, sonny,” he said. “Watch the skies and remember to take precautions.”

  “What sort of precautions?” I asked, but he was already gone.

  SHE’LL BE RIGHT, MATE

  Australia is hot.

  Like, REALLY hot. Frying-eggs-on-the-sidewalk hot. Ice-cream-melting-before-you-can-take-the-first-lick hot. Did I mention it was hot?

  It was so hot that all thoughts of drop bears vanished immediately. Having my brains sucked out and eaten would be the least of my problems. I’d be boiled alive long before that happened.

  Hey, Hills Village has its hot days—plenty of them—but there was one small but VERY important detail I’d forgotten. While it was winter back home, here in Upside-Down Land it was most definitely summer. And I was still wearing my winter clothes.

  “This is nice,” Mom said, smiling.

  I looked at her like she’d gone crazy. Somehow, between leaving the plane and getting outside, and without me noticing a thing, she’d magically changed into light summer clothes. How do they do that? Moms, I mean.

  “Nice?” I said. “Nice?”

  I’d expected Australia to be warm, but this was something else. People needed Special Forces training to deal with this kind of thing. How did Australians stop themselves from melting? Did they have some sort of force field? Ice water running through their veins? Skin like elephant hide? Whatever it was, I needed to find out—and soon.

  To make matters worse, the airline lost our bags.

  “Once we find ’em, we’ll send ’em up to Shark’s Bay,” the smiling, blond, surfer-type guy said from behind the desk. “She’ll be right, mate.”

  I have no idea what “She’ll be right, mate” means, but I’m guessing it’s something like “I have absolutely no idea what the outcome of this problem might be, up to and including injury and/or death, but I’m blindly hoping that things will turn out for the best.” Never trust an Australian who says this to you, as I’ve learned. And, no, I don’t know why it’s always “she” who’ll be right and not “he.” It just is.

  What I found out in Australia was that quite often things did not turn out right, but—and this is the important thing to remember—it never stopped Australians from saying they would. Be warned.

  Plus, we found out that the trip north to Shark’s Bay was going to take SEVEN HOURS.

  On a bus with a malfunctioning air conditioner.

  Seven.

  HOURS.

  A TV at the front of the bus was switched to the news. The grinning anchorman proudly told us that Australia was experiencing one of the hottest days on record, with the mercury nudging 46 degrees Celsius. The guy sounded like that was something to boast about.

  “That’s 115 degrees Fahrenheit!” I gasped. “Seven hours without air-conditioning?” I asked the driver.

  “She’ll be right, mate,” he replied, smiling like a hyena with a caffeine problem.

  See?

  I’ll spare you most of the horrible details of our journey.

  All you need to know is that at one point a bug as big as a bear flew across my face and, instead of screaming like a normal person, I was just grateful for the breeze
.

  When we arrived at our first rest stop, I staggered down the steps of the bus. Wherever we’d stopped was hotter than Sydney. I was literally melting.

  I was about to complain, but after seeing Mom’s scary jet-lagged expression, I stopped melting and got back on the bus without a word.

  At least I didn’t see any more drop bears in the trees. It was probably too hot, even for them.

  THUNDER DOWN UNDER

  When the bus arrived in Shark’s Bay, the boiling day had curdled into a full-scale thunderstorm. Rain of biblical proportions hammered down on the roof of the bus.

  I gazed out the window and nudged Mom. “Look at that.”

  Outside, palm trees were bending in the wind. It was like the news footage you see when Channel 2 is reporting a Category 5 storm from Miami or Haiti. I saw a small car tumbling through the air, followed by a pizza shop and what looked like a whole herd of cows.

  Okay, I made that last part up. But it did look bad.

  “I hope it’s not a hurricane,” Mom said. She leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “This isn’t a hurricane or something we should be worried about, is it?” She paused, then added, “We’re American.”