The Boy with 17 Senses Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Grau, Sheila, author.

  Title: The boy with 17 senses / by Sheila Grau.

  Other titles: Boy with seventeen senses

  Description: New York : Amulet Books, 2016. | Summary: A retelling of “Jack and the Beanstalk” on the unusual planet Yipsmix, where every resident has synesthesia, including Jaq, who travels through a wormhole to Earth, where he must rescue a fellow Yipsmixer with the help of a kind Earthling giant.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015051081 (print) | LCCN 2016012675 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781419721199 (hardback) | ISBN 9781613120828 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Fairy tales. | Synesthesia—Fiction. | Senses and sensation—Fiction. | Magic—Fiction. | Giants—Fiction. | Science fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Fairy Tales & Folklore / Adaptations. | JUVENILE FICTION / Science Fiction. | JUVENILE FICTION / Humorous Stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ8.G7477 Bo 2016 (print) | LCC PZ8.G7477 (ebook) | DDC [398.2]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015051081

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-2119-9

  eISBN: 978-1-6131-2082-8

  Text copyright © 2016 Sheila Grau

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 Adam Rex

  Book design by Chad W. Beckerman

  Published in 2016 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

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  Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear.

  —SAPPHO, GREEK POET

  1

  THE TASTE OF W

  To the people of Yipsmix, the word wipper tastes like spoiled milk. It’s a rotten and sour taste, which perfectly fits the rodent that bears its name. The wipper might look creamy white and furry, but it is the most sharply unpleasant animal on their planet.

  To be fair to wippers, most w words have this sort of taste, unless the w is paired with o-r, as in world or worm. Those words taste earthy and fresh, like a rich mushroom soup. The word wonderful doesn’t quite make the jump from disgusting w to delightful w-o-r. It has an average sort of taste, like white rice, which is a shame. Imagine—you describe something as wonderful, and the other person has to take your word for it because his mouth is telling him that it’s boring.

  But back to those annoying wippers, because everything that happened to young Jaq Rollop can be traced to the day the wippers showed up in his garden.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Jaq said at breakfast. “We’ve got wippers.”

  His mother and grandfather both winced at the word, as if it had struck them across the face.

  “Great moons, no,” his mother said.

  “Chimichanga,” Grandpa said, to get the bad taste of the word wipper out of his mouth. Chimichanga has a nice, meaty-crispy flavor.

  Jaq lifted his pant leg and showed them the bite marks on his ankle. Wippers love to bite ankles.

  His mother pressed some damp tea leaves onto the bites to stop the poison from spreading. Then she gave him a kiss good-bye and a lunch bag filled with tasty words written on a piece of paper that Jaq could read as he ate the very bland ripweed sandwich. The Rollops were poor; they couldn’t afford fancy foods like lunch meats or juice.

  Young Jaq Rollop was in his seventh year of rudimentary school, which meant he was forty-nine years old. That’s a little over twelve Earth years, or seventy-three and a half Epsidor Erandi years, for readers on those planets (Hello! And, Erip nu!). I’m not quite sure about the equivalent years on Zanflid, because of the complicated dual-sun situation and its extremely elongated elliptical orbit. Suffice it to say, in his species Jaq was medium-sized, and his second molars had just come in.

  The Rollop family lived on a farm at the far edge of Cruxlump, where the land was baked by the sun and as dry as a stale cookie. They grew ripweed because little else would grow in that unfriendly soil. Ripweed tastes wonderful, or, rather, it tastes like the word wonderful tastes, which is boring.

  Jaq also had a garden where he grew a few brickleberry vines and some vegetables beside their one-room house. He did most of the chores on the family’s small farm because his father was gone, his mother worked all day at the hushware factory, and his grandfather had trouble moving because he was lazy.

  Jaq plowed the soil, planted the seeds, and pulled the weeds. He sold whatever he grew at the farmers’ market, and his mom let him keep half of what he earned, which was barely enough to buy himself a large, sweet, double-shot, extra-hot saltmint drink with heavy whip on the way home from school.

  He needed that sweet treat. Farming was hard work on a normal day. Farming on top of school and homework was painful drudgery. When you throw in a nest of wippers, it’s enough to make a guy cry like a twenty-two-year-old.

  The wippers took him by surprise that first morning. He was picking brickleberries for breakfast when he saw a flash of white scurry by his foot and disappear into the next row of vines. Jaq chased after it, but instead of running away, the small rodent turned around to face him.

  Jaq smiled. The little critter was just a big-eyed bundle of white fluff, no bigger than his foot. It had a twitchy little nose covered with whiskers and floppy ears that perked up like curious lightbulbs. Just as Jaq was thinking about how cute it was, it sneered at him.

  “You looking at me, farm boy?” it said.

  “W-w-what?” Jaq was stunned. The wipper wasn’t scared of him at all.

  “Stop following me,” the wipper said. “Jeez, you’re going to step on my tail, you clumsy fat-foot.”

  As Jaq stood there in shock, another wipper snuck up behind him and bit his ankle. When he turned around to kick it, the wipper catapulted itself away, jumping higher than Jaq’s head. Boing! As Jaq watched, a third nipped him from behind. They were small bites, and only mildly poisonous to Jaq, but after six or seven, it got really annoying.

  After that, every morning and afternoon was the same. Jaq would go to work in the garden or in the fields, and the wippers would attack. He found that he was mostly immune to the poison of the wipper bite, but not so immune to the sarcastic taunts that flew out of the wippers like spit. Imagine a field of older siblings, popping up unexpectedly to insult your outfit, or that pimple on your nose, or to tell you that you throw like a toddler. That’s what a field infested with wippers is like.

  “Hey, dummy! I’m beginning to think you couldn’t grow a weed in a field of manure,” one would say.

  “I know, right?” another would agree. “How hard can it be to grow brickleberries?”

  “I bet he couldn’t grow mold on an old piece of cheese.”

  “You did plant seeds, right? Pebbles don’t sprout, in case you were wondering.”

  Jaq put out traps for the pests,
but the very next day he was served with a cease and desist order from the Wipper Protection Society. That’s right, those pesky wippers are a protected species, which meant that Jaq couldn’t kill them; he couldn’t even rough ’em up a little. The members of the WPS are city folk who think that if an animal is cute, it can’t possibly be a pest. As a result of this protection, wippers aren’t afraid of farmers, because they know the farmers can’t touch them.

  There is only one animal the wipper is afraid of: the freasel, known affectionately by farmers as “the wipper-slinger.” Jaq needed a freasel, but to get a freasel, he’d have to get permission from his mother.

  And unfortunately for Jaq, his mother’s favorite word was no, even though it tasted like fish paste.

  2

  THE WEIGHT OF WORDS

  No matter which planet you live on, you’re going to have to do some work if you want a pet of your very own. On Epsidor Erandi, it’s a long process that involves allergy tests, training courses, home-safety measures, and a review of the child’s crammed-full-of-activities schedule to see if there’s room in it for pet care. If a child manages to make it through all that, then the desired pet is declawed and defanged, and purchased, along with a leash that matches the one the child has been wearing since he or she could walk.

  Parents can be slightly overprotective on Epsidor Erandi.

  I’m not entirely sure how kids on Zanflid get their pets, but I think it involves a trek through the jungle with a large bug and a can of net spray. The bug chews a path through the poisonous kufi plants, revealing the small bamu bears that dwell beneath them. One shot of net spray and—swoosh!—you’ve captured your first pet. If its mother doesn’t eat you first.

  On Yipsmix, much like on Earth, the first step in getting a pet is proving to your parent that you can take care of it. Jaq tried to show how responsible he’d be by looking after his grandfather so his mom could rest after a hard day’s work.

  “If I can take care of Grandpa,” he told her, “a freasel should be a piece a cake.” That was true. Not only was Grandpa lazy, but when he was upset, he also had a habit of angrily pointing at things and making everyone guess his complaint. This was annoying for all involved, even Grandpa, but he did it just so he could say, “You’ll never hear me complain,” and nobody could call him a liar.

  To ease his mother’s burden, Jaq jumped in whenever Grandpa got pointy: “The soup’s too hot? The soup’s too cold? The soup tastes like wonderful tastes? Soup shouldn’t be that gray color?”

  Grandpa frowned and pointed at his soup again.

  “The bowl’s too small? You want the purple bowl? Hmm. You’re looking at me through the hole in your spoon. You want to play peekaboo? No? What is it? Now your spoon is leaking. Oh! You need a new spoon!” Jaq jumped up and got another spoon for Grandpa, then looked at his mom. But she simply said no.

  Jaq knew that his classmate Wixlix had just gotten his own freasel, so Jaq asked him to come over after school. Kids didn’t really like coming all the way out to the edge of Cruxlump, so Jaq had to promise to do Wixlix’s homework for a week. When his mother was within hearing range, Jaq prompted Wixlix to talk about how great it was to have a freasel.

  After Wixlix left, Jaq said, “See, Mom? All the other kids have them.”

  But his mom said no.

  No is such a hard word to swallow.

  Jaq kept trying. He made a little freasel shed out of wood he found by the river. He tucked the little home in a corner of the garden.

  “A freasel could help me in the fields,” he said. “I’ll get more work done.”

  “No.”

  “Look at my ankles!” he shouted in desperation. His ankles were covered in red dots, the bites of the wippers. “And they make fun of my hair.”

  “The boy needs a freasel,” Grandpa said. “Give them wippers a taste of their own medicine.”

  “Just ignore them,” Mom said. “I’m sorry, Jaq, but we can’t afford a pet.”

  Jaq saved his farmers’ market money and tried to earn a bit more by helping out at other stalls. He gave up his after-school sweet drink—which he needed more than ever, now that he was doing three times the usual amount of homework. (His neighbor Tormy Vilcot had heard about his deal with Wixlix and made Jaq do his homework, too, or he’d tell.)

  “I’ll pay for its food,” he promised.

  “No,” said Mom.

  “Arrr!” Jaq threw his hands in the air. Of course his mother said no. She always said no. Whether he asked if he could go with other kids on a camping trip (“No, it’s harvesting time.”) or for new spiked shoes so he could play vargyball (“No, you already have a pair of shoes.”) or for a little pet, it didn’t matter. His mom would always say no.

  Grandpa gave him a pat on the back. “When I was a kid, I had three freasels. Called them Cap, Milfrix, and Tammy. I had a hoverbike, too. Didn’t realize how good I had it. Now it’s all gone. Thanks to that farm-stealing Ripley Vilcot.”

  “Not helpful, Grandpa,” Jaq said.

  That night, Jaq sat in bed, thinking, I just gotta have a freasel. I just . . . gotta . . . have . . . a . . . FREASEL!

  The next day, Jaq walked home from school with his head hung low, pulled down by the powerful gravity of all those nos. No is such a heavy word.

  Tormy Vilcot rode past Jaq on his hoverbike. He turned in circles just to stir up the dust, and laughed. Needless to say, Jaq did not like Tormy Vilcot.

  “When are you losers going to sell us that pathetic farm of yours so I can finally have the swimming pool my grandfather promised me?” Tormy shouted as he spun around Jaq.

  Jaq didn’t answer. He had no answer. His family had nowhere else to go.

  “You know, I kind of like not having to do homework,” Tormy said. “Maybe you should keep doing mine from now on.”

  Jaq ignored him, which just made Tormy laugh harder.

  “How’s the farming going? I bet it’s hard to harvest when your ankles are being attacked, huh?” And then he laughed again and sped off for home.

  Of course, Jaq thought. Tormy—no, probably Tormy’s grandfather—had planted the wippers in their field. The Vilcots had been trying to buy the Rollop farm for years, but Grandpa refused to leave. If there was one thing Jaq hated more than those horrible Vilcots, it was . . . well, nothing, because he really hated those horrible Vilcots.

  As he neared home, Jaq passed the Vilcots’ massive farm, with its mechanical harvesters and its herd of mantelopes, which gave the tastiest milk on all of Yipsmix. Grandpa’s voice played in his head: When that was my farm, we didn’t just have mantelopes. We had robuses, caponutters, and gows, too.

  “Not helpful, Grandpa,” Jaq said to the voice in his head.

  Jaq, already beaten down by all those nos, felt his head sag even lower at the thought that the Vilcots would tear down his home just so Tormy could have a swimming pool. At home, he crouched over his three sets of homework, taking breaks only to rub out painful hand cramps.

  He slumped through his work in the field, getting his ankles nipped by those pesky wippers. But drooping over like that just meant the wippers got a better look at his head.

  “Honestly—that hair,” one of the wippers said. “What do you cut it with?”

  “Safety scissors, I bet,” said another.

  The rest laughed.

  “I bet he cuts it in the dark,” said another. “With nail clippers.”

  They howled with laughter.

  “I bet he uses a stapler,” another one said.

  This was followed by an awkward silence.

  “That doesn’t even make sense, Bonip,” the first one said. “You can’t cut anything with a stapler.”

  “I know, I know,” the one called Bonip said. “Um, a hole puncher?”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” the first one said. “Now I’ve lost my flow.” He rolled his shoulders, did some shadowboxing, then said, “Hey, kid, I saw another guy wearing that same shirt. It’s amazing h
ow different it looks on someone with muscles.”

  The wippers roared with laughter again.

  By the end of the day, Jaq’s head felt so heavy, he just plopped it on the table and slurped up his plain noodles while his mom tried to spice them up with a poem by Niviax Wormager. She wrote the most delicious poems, using words like luminous and bungalow and elixir.

  Grandpa patted him on the back. “When I was a kid, I had a butler who fed me when I was worn out from riding bungee-cycles all day,” he said.

  “Not helpful, Grandpa,” Jaq muttered. “You know, I think the Vilcots planted the wippers here. Tormy as much as said so on the way home from school. He wants us to sell so he can have a swimming pool.”

  “Never!” Grandpa shouted, slamming his fist on the table. “That farm-stealing Ripley Vilcot is NOT getting this land. I’d pluck my eyeballs out of my head before I’d let that happen. We’re not leaving!”

  That was easy for Grandpa to say. He didn’t have to face the wippers twice a day.

  3

  15 IS A VERY RUDE NUMBER

  The next day, Jaq stopped at the Pests-B-Gone Emporium on his way home from school. (The one in the marketplace, not the one out by the hushware factory.) Mostly, he wanted to avoid Tormy on the road home, but he also wanted to see the freasels.

  He’d wanted a freasel ever since he’d heard the name, with its cuddly free sound that tasted like pasta smothered with melted cheese. Even looking at the word on the wall gave him a warm feeling inside, until he saw the price.

  The freasels were 15 damars each. 15 is an obscenely tall and smug number. It’s the kind of number that doesn’t care if it hurts your feelings. To the people of Yipsmix, every number has its own personality, which is why they take great care in using them. By pricing the freasels at an arrogant 15, Pests-B-Gone was saying, These animals are too fabulous for the likes of you. And that made people want them even more.