Finally, Something Dangerous by Doug Cornett

Author:Doug Cornett [Cornett, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2022-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

Wrestling with Changes

I rolled my bike out of our driveway and picked up speed on the open stretch of road. Standing up on the pedals and leaning over the handlebars, I felt my long hair flow behind me as my eyes teared up from the wind in my face. The sun was just starting to slide down the sky to my right, and for the first time since spring, I felt the tiniest chill in the air. It was late summer, after all, or early fall, depending on who you asked, and it felt like the weather was changing. Actually, it felt like all of Bellwood was changing.

Another Thursday night meant another Lyrical Warriors Poetry Wrestling Club meeting at the rec center. As always, the One and Onlys would meet up there, but this time, we wouldn’t just be watching from the sidelines. We’d be sniffing out suspects. Whoever was controlling the robot crow, or crows, from the statue of Munchaus’s shoe had eaten a Bozo bar, which they could only have gotten from the vending machine in the rec center. I had a hunch that the culprit must be a Lyrical Warrior. But who?

I’d asked my parents if I could ride my bike and meet them there. The rec center was nestled near the center of Bellwood, right next to the elementary school, but I was planning on taking a meandering route. The journey would give me time to sort out in my head some of the details of the Case of the Robot Crow, and it would also be an opportunity to swing by Munchaus Park and look for any clues as to who might have picked up the package Mr. Nemo left there.

It felt good to go fast. Racing on my bike was uncomplicated. It wasn’t confusing. If you pumped your legs, you would go fast, and unlike Peephole, I liked going fast. It calmed me down. The faster I went and the blurrier the world around me got, the more at peace I felt.

But as I whipped down Radford, I was distracted by the changes to the street. They were small changes, mostly unnoticeable if you weren’t looking for them, but since I knew every street and corner of Bellwood, anything new jumped out at me. First were the streetlamps. They had been installed only in the last week or so, and they were bright and silvery and hung like question marks over the road. Then the grass. It was green. Like, really, really green. Probably because of the new town-wide sprinkler system that sprayed water on all city land every hour. And then the new signs, which seemed to be everywhere. Signs showing the speed limit, signs flashing for a crosswalk, signs thanking you for not littering. I didn’t know what New Bellwood would be like, exactly, but I knew there would be a lot of signs.

Up ahead, I caught a glimpse of Butter Baby’s and the enormous milkshake rotating on its roof. Lit up in neon, it seemed to attract me to it like I was a bug and it was a lightbulb.

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