Body Switchers from Outer Space

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  ‘Fright Christmas’ Excerpt

  About R. L. Stine

  1

  I hate spaghetti days at Shadyside Middle School.

  But does anyone ask my opinion? No. Instead, they torture me with spaghetti every Thursday.

  I was prepared. I wore my spaghetti-day clothes—a red-orange shirt with white lines. That way, stains would be less likely to show up. But this spaghetti day was worse than usual. The lunch lady glopped spaghetti and chocolate pudding onto everybody’s lunch tray.

  So when I tripped, I knew my shirt was doomed.

  Okay, I admit it. It doesn’t take much to trip me. A crack in the sidewalk. A piece of paper in my path. I’m really a huge klutz. My feet just don’t get along with each other. But this time it wasn’t my fault. Somebody stuck out his foot as I passed by. I didn’t have a chance.

  Wham! I fell face-down on the floor, right on top of the tray. Yecchhhh! Hot spaghetti and cold pudding smooshed together under me. All across the front of my only slightly stained, almost clean shirt.

  No matter how many times I take a flop, it still really bugs me!

  “Way to go, Will the Spill!” somebody yelled. Then some kids started chanting, “Will the Spill! Will the Spill!” Yeah, that’s right. I’m sort of a legend here at Shadyside Middle School. No one ever calls me by my real name, Will Kennedy. Noooo. It’s always Will the Spill.

  I got up. And slipped on a blob of cottage cheese someone had thrown. Down I went. I scrambled to my feet again.

  I could feel heat creeping across my face. I knew I was turning beet-red all the way to my ears. I always do.

  I picked up my tray and shoveled as much gunk back onto it as I could. With my head down, watching my feet, I shuffled carefully toward the window. I wasn’t going to take another spill. I would stash my tray with the others on the windowsill and quietly sneak out to my locker. I was starving, but no way was I going through the spaghetti line again. I keep a supply of Twinkies for spaghetti-day emergencies.

  “Hey, Will.”

  I glanced around to see who called my name. My actual name. Chad Miller gave me a wave from a nearby table.

  Yeah, Chad Miller. The coolest kid in Shadyside Middle School. He’s our star athlete. At every sport.

  Chad doesn’t have a mouthful of braces like me, either. His teeth are as straight and white as a TV star’s. He has straight blond hair. Mine’s dark and always messy.

  So why was Mr. Perfect—the coolest guy in school—calling me? I really wasn’t sure. The whole time he’s been at Shadyside, he’s never said two words to me.

  Until a few weeks ago, when Chad said hi to me on my way to class. At first I thought, He can’t be talking to me. I glanced all around the hallway to see who he was speaking to. But there was no one else around. And Chad was looking straight at me.

  Then, last week, he borrowed my notes. And yesterday he asked me to shoot hoops with him. It was weird, to say the least. But it was also nice to have someone as cool as Chad paying attention to me. I felt as if I was in the middle of my favorite daydream, the one where I’m one of the cool kids and everybody likes me and envies me because I never make any mistakes and I’m not clumsy.

  “Will, come here a minute,” Chad called, snapping me out of my thoughts. He waved a bunch of napkins at me.

  I noticed an empty chair at his table.

  I sat down by Chad and took the napkins from him. I cleaned myself off as well as I could.

  Chad glanced at the other kids at the table. “You guys are finished, right?” he said.

  For a second nothing happened. The other kids looked at each other.

  Then they nodded, picked up their trays or sack lunches, and left.

  Making people go away just because you said so! Now, that’s power!

  How did Chad do it?

  His eyes darted around. I guess he didn’t want anyone to hear our conversation. No one was nearby.

  He leaned toward me and said, “You ever get fed up with being yourself? You ever want to be somebody else?”

  I stared at him. “Are you kidding?” I wondered if Chad could read my mind.

  I hate being me.

  My feet always trip me.

  I can’t throw.

  I can’t catch.

  I can’t kick.

  I continued staring at Chad. I remembered watching him in gym class. Boy, could he tear up the basketball court. He could hit home runs. He could pitch.

  Everybody wanted to talk to him, but they wouldn’t unless he talked to them first.

  He was the definition of cool at Shadyside Middle School.

  If I could pick anyone else to be, Chad would be number one on the list!

  “No, I’m not kidding,” Chad said. “Don’t you wish you could be somebody else?”

  I looked down at the chocolate pudding stains on my spaghetti shirt.

  I didn’t even have to imagine what my little sister Pepper would say when I got home. I’d heard it all before.

  “I’d give anything to be someone else!” I finally answered.

  Chad lowered his voice. “Listen,” he said. “My dad’s a scientist. He has a machine that can switch people’s bodies.” He glanced around the cafeteria again. Then his eyes locked onto mine.

  “Let’s do it!” he urged. “Let’s switch bodies!”

  2

  “Huh?” I said. I must have heard wrong. He couldn’t have said what I thought he said.

  “Just for an hour,” Chad continued.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Switching bodies,” he repeated.

  “You’re making this up!” I may be clumsy and uncool, but I’m not stupid. Chad had to be joking.

  “No. It’s true,” he insisted. “I saw my dad do it. He put a dog in one change chamber and a cat in the other. When they came out, the cat barked, and the dog climbed trees. It really works! I’ve wanted to try it out for a long time. But everyone I ask is too scared. You’re not scared—are you, Will?”

  No way! I wasn’t scared because this whole thing absolutely could not be true. It was unbelievable! And I wasn’t buying it.

  “My dad’s done it with people before. I know he has,” Chad went on. His eyes sparkled, as if he were really excited. “I looked at his lab book where he wrote down the experiments. I know how to work the machine, Will. We could do it, just for an hour.”

  I stared at him. He seemed pretty serious.

  This story sounded so wild it had to be a joke.

  But boy, was I wishing it could be true!

  Sometimes it seemed as if I had spent the last two years doing stupid, klutzy things. Like falling into my spaghetti. But that part didn’t really bother me anymore. What really steamed me was when other people laughed at me. And when they called me things like Will the Spill.

  I have my own private revenge, though. I draw cartoons. See, my dad writes stories for that cartoon show, Judo-Jabbing Adolescent Mutated Coyotes. I began drawing pictures of the coyotes when I was three. I started drawing pictures of everything else pretty soon after that.

  In the back of my notebook I have mean, funny pictures of everybody who has ever picked on me. I have pages and
pages. There were always new people to draw.

  Of course, nobody knows I’m fighting back, because I almost never show my cartoons to anyone. But someday I’m going to photocopy all my pictures and put them on bulletin boards all over school. Then we’ll see who’s laughing.

  Well, I dream about doing that, anyway.

  Almost as often as I dream about being someone like Chad.

  Chad’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Come on, Will.” He wasn’t giving up. “What have you got to lose? One hour. We’ll switch bodies for just one little hour. You said you’d do anything to be someone else.”

  “But—” Oh, man! If only!

  “It really works. Honest it does. It’s safe, too. The cat and dog switched back and went right back to normal.”

  I stared at him. I could be one of the coolest kids in school! Could it be this easy?

  “Come on, Will.” He held up his arm, made a muscle, looked at it for a second, then grinned at me. “You want to switch. You know you do.”

  Maybe this was just a dumb joke, but why should that stop me? I fall for dumb jokes all the time.

  And if it wasn’t? That was too awesome even to think about.

  “Okay!” I told him. “I’ll do it!”

  He stood and smiled his bright, white, straight-toothed smile. “I knew you’d come around. Meet me in the playground after school.” Then he dashed out of the cafeteria, waving at kids who called out his name.

  I shook my head a few times, trying to clear it. If this wasn’t a joke, it was all too good to be true.

  After school, when we reached Chad’s house on Fear Street, he didn’t invite me inside. Instead, he signaled for me to stay back. He snuck behind a tree in the front yard and glanced at the windows. All the curtains were closed, and none of them moved.

  He waved at me and I joined him behind the tree. “All clear,” he whispered. We walked our bikes quickly past the side of the house. “If my mom or dad knew we were doing this, we’d be in a lot of trouble.”

  I couldn’t even imagine what my parents would say!

  Chad led me to a shed in the backyard. You couldn’t see it from the street. The closer we got to it, the stranger it looked.

  It was like no other backyard shed I had ever seen. It was shaped like a puffy mushroom, big and round and bulging. Some of the bushes and vines grew right up over it.

  The shed was shiny silver and it had no windows. I couldn’t even see a door. I did spot a yellow-green circle the size of a baseball stuck on the smooth wall. It had a raised black border around it.

  Chad touched the yellow-green part with his thumb. Whoosh! A round opening appeared in the side of the shed.

  My mouth dropped open. Some door! It was totally invisible. No hinges. Not even an outline. No way to know it was there until Chad opened it. I had never seen anything like it.

  I let out a little whistle. “Wow!” I was totally impressed.

  Chad shrugged. “My dad invents lots of stuff.” He nodded at the mushroom building.

  “Cool,” I said.

  It was. Totally cool. Chad’s dad must be one great inventor.

  Did that mean Chad had been telling the truth? And there really was a body-switching machine in there?

  A green light glowed from inside the shed, and I could hear a ticking noise. My heart pounded double time. I glanced down to see if it was popping out of my chest.

  That’s when I noticed all of today’s stains down the front of my shirt. There were green grass stains from gym in addition to red spaghetti blotches and brown pudding smudges. Plus a few spots that hadn’t come out in the wash from last spaghetti day.

  Some things never change.

  But—maybe they could.

  I’ve wanted to be someone else for such a long time. And besides, Chad would think I was a total wimp if I backed out now.

  I couldn’t let a whooshing door and a weird shed stop me.

  “Come on in.” Chad stood in the silver mushroom doorway, waiting.

  Well, here goes.

  I stepped across the threshold and gave a little gasp of surprise. My foot sank deep into the floor. It was made of some kind of pink, spongy material. I bent down to examine it. The floor felt soft and warm on my hand. I poked at it in a few places before straightening up.

  I watched Chad touch a yellow-green badge on an inside wall near the door. The opening whooshed shut. I glanced around the inside of the shed.

  I don’t think I had ever been in a round room before. A large yellow circle was painted on the floor. A pale green light glowed from the ceiling. I noticed four big dark gray boxes that reached to the ceiling and looked like closets. These had visible doors, only the knobs were square and near the bottom. Wicked-looking lockers—if that’s what they were!

  Shiny machines of all different shapes and sizes stood along the walls. They were made of brightly colored metal—green metal, red metal, purple metal—and they were all wrapped with thin wires and multicolored metal ribbons.

  What could the machines be for? Were they more of Chad’s dad’s inventions? What other kinds of experiments did he do?

  Two of the biggest machines in the room stood side by side. These looked like purple telephone booths without windows. Next to them was a table with a slanted top covered in shiny colored patches. I figured the table was the control panel. Those patches looked like the one Chad had touched to open and close the door to the shed.

  Chad strode to the slanted table and pressed his thumb on a square blue patch.

  Oval doors whooshed open on the sides of the telephone booths.

  They looked dark and empty inside, and a sour smell came from them.

  “Excellent,” I said. I hurried over to join Chad at the slant-topped table. Well, actually, I bounced over because of the spongy floor. I wanted to check out that control panel.

  Some of the slick patches on it were square, some round, some oval. One or two were squiggle-shaped. Each patch was a different color, surrounded by a black line. This was neat stuff.

  “How does it work? And what are those metal things?” I asked, waving at the machines around the room.

  “Never mind,” Chad said. “We need to get into the change chambers.” He pointed at the giant purple telephone booths. “That’s how we switch bodies.”

  Something in the room was humming the way a refrigerator does when it’s working. A lot of power was generating in the shed. These machines were plugged in and ready to go. If body switching was possible, these babies looked like just the machines to do it.

  “Ready?” Chad asked. He smiled at me.

  Those could be my perfect teeth. What a weird thought.

  Come on, Will. Go for it. What have you got to lose?

  I stumbled across the floor and tripped into one of the purple chambers.

  The inner surface was shiny and dark. I touched the wall. It was warm and wet. The sour smell surrounded me.

  Chad still stood by the table.

  “All set?” he called.

  “Aren’t you getting in the other one?” I asked. My palms started to sweat. What if something went wrong?

  What if it was all just a mean joke?

  What if Chad shut me in here and left me?

  What if he never let me out?

  What if . . .? All of a sudden this didn’t seem like the best idea.

  “I’ll pop in as soon as I program the body-switch,” Chad explained. He pressed his fingers on the patches on the table.

  The opening in the side of the chamber whooshed shut.

  I plunged into darkness. Total, stinky darkness.

  The floor started humming under my feet. My body began to vibrate, and the hum seemed to spread all through me.

  I had no idea whether Chad had gotten into the other chamber.

  Pink squiggly lines of light flowed over the walls. The lines turned into green swirls. Then, bursts of colored light lit up the chamber like fireworks.

  Oh, man! Maybe I wasn’t ready for th
is, after all.

  Mist rose from the floor and came down from the ceiling. It made me cough. It wasn’t cold and wet mist, it was more like smoke from a fire, only it tasted like perfume and it was pink.

  My skin felt as if it was sizzling and popping, the way carbonation tastes on your tongue when you’re not used to it. The air had become very hot. I felt as if I were flying, but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Something was definitely happening!

  I wish I knew what was going on with Chad! Did he get into the other chamber? Was this all working the way it was supposed to?

  A noise under my feet pulsed, slowly at first, then faster and faster. My body twitched to the beat. The sound pounded louder and louder, thumping like a drum or a heart. Suddenly a huge sideways lurch tossed me into the wall of the chamber. I thought I was going to throw up.

  Then nothing.

  No sound. No fireworks. No nothing.

  Had it worked? Was I in Chad’s body? Was he in mine?

  For a minute I couldn’t breathe. My lungs felt squashed.

  All my muscles felt stretched out and burned.

  I tried to move my head, to look around.

  My neck didn’t work!

  I grabbed for the walls, but my arms just lay by my side. I couldn’t lift a finger!

  No! I thought. Something horrible must have happened! What’s wrong with me? Am I paralyzed?

  My heart pounded so hard my ears hurt. I couldn’t move a single muscle, and I couldn’t even breathe.

  My body was completely frozen in place!

  3

  I struggled to move. My mind raced around and around. Trapped. Would I ever be able to move again?

  The mist began to clear. The chamber cooled off. It was dark again inside the telephone booth.

  Dark as a tomb.

  I gasped. And this time my chest heaved and managed to pull in a huge breath.

  Air! Hurray!

  I realized I was really thirsty. Probably because of how hot it was in the chamber.

  I licked my lips. Something was different.

  But what?

  My tongue pressed against the backs of my teeth. They were the wrong shape.

  I couldn’t feel my braces!

  Could it be . . .?