Another NASTYbook: The Curse of the Tweeties by Barry Yourgrau

Author:Barry Yourgrau [Yourgrau, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-202971-3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

But really: where is Fairyland?

Eleven

“Pleasant Lake? Spare me, oh, please….”

“Yeah, we were just there, imagine?” yawns Noreen, phonily blasé, as if she was entirely bored by Renee’s generalized snicker about the place.

The topic has somehow come up while they’re on a break from flirting at the mall, where their new borrowed jewelry accessories have provoked interest and, better yet, shock and envy. “Pleasant Lake, it’s so nowhere, nothing ever happens there,” drawls Noreen. “It’s so like—for losers.”

And she rolls her heavily cosmeticized eyes.

* * *

“Pleasant Lake,” Rollo murmurs to himself. Blinking in puzzlement.

But that’s where he’s headed now—hurtling along on his quest in Harv Tweetie’s car, which was parked way off in an abandoned lot, to save on prison parking fees. Except the lot turned out not to be abandoned. And guess who wound up paying the grinning owner?

And Harv Tweetie’s car is so ancient, it could come from an antique car museum. Except it doesn’t look like it’s ever been washed, and its wheels are crooked, and its tires are almost flat, and its doors are scraped and dented, and its bumpers sag, and its muffler obviously has a hole, and black smoke squirts and billows from its backfiring exhaust. “PRISON AMBULANCE—PRIVATE” is painted somewhat confusingly on its hood and sides. It resembles very little the rainbow-powered eagle chariot, which the Wind Gods loaned Su-ichi Samurai Swordboy on his journey to the stronghold of the Robot Reptiles.

“But if Fairyland is by Pleasant Lake, like you say,” mutters Rollo, still perplexed by Harv Tweetie’s dramatic announcement of where they were off to, “how come we never heard about it?” A certain person’s voice echoes sneering in his head. He bounces in his seat, Harv Tweetie being an alarmingly bad driver.

The adventurer’s good eye twitches irritably, taking itself off the road again. The dashing stained white scarf he now sports flaps and whirls dangerously around his helmet in the window breeze. “Don’t you ever listen, Raleigh?” he snaps. “Are you so far gone in depraved criminal psychohood, you can’t heed?”

His tone displays a similar exasperation to the one Rollo’s dad gets with him, except Harv Tweetie’s involves the crunching and spraying of celery and carrot too. As with the other twin, Rollo does a lot of brushing off of his Jellyfish shirt.

“It’s Rollo,” Rollo corrects stubbornly. “It’s just that Noreen—”

His words are drowned out by the blare of the antique rubber-bulb car horn that Harv Tweetie blasts at a bicyclist, who looks around wildly and careens off the road, and crashes somersaulting into the trees.

“Not any old ‘by Pleasant Lake’—know what to look for, do you? Eh?” demands Harv Tweetie, continuing. “And comprehend what you’re seeing? Can’t simply use the map!” he snorts. He raps at his elaborate safari pocket containing an honest-to-God special map of Fairyland. “Got to decipher it. Crafty, understand? That’s what it takes, I keep telling you: crafty! Eh, Mo?” he says, to the false teeth on their seat on the dashboard.

“Crafty,” reply the joke dentures.

But it’s this crafty mumbo jumbo that’s put Harv Tweetie in such a foul mood.

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