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  Chapter Eight

  Screaming guitars bsted through my room loudly enough to blow my hair back, apanied by singing that I’m pretty sure was made by disemboweling a live hippopotamus.

  “Henry, turn that trash off!” my dad yelled from downstairs.

  With my face still buried in my pillow, I reached out and blindly filed for the arm clock. We’d learned a long time ago that the only thing that could get me out of bed was Niah Metal—mostly because if I slept through it, someone would wake me up to make me turn it off.

  “JEG HATER DET N?R DU IKKE KJ?RER SKORREN AV PAN?TTSM?RET OG GELEEN MIN—” click!

  I rolled over and yawned. My mouth tasted like I’d been gargling toilet water—which I know couldn’t have happened since my parents had padlocked the bathroom at night ever since my first sleepwalking i.

  Speaking of the bathroom…

  “Gotta pee, gotta pee, gotta pee,” I muttered under my breath as I flopped out of bed. My vision was still all blurry, eyes as chy as a bag of potato chips, which meant I had to veo the bathroom by memory.

  “Good m, Henry,” said the sasquat the hallway.

  “Mornin’,” I mumbled, and—

  WHAT.

  I spun around, sure that I must have imagi. As if I’d ever be that lucky. But there it stood, in bold defiance of on sense: a and a half foot tall pile of hair and muscle.

  It spread its arms like it wanted a hug. “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think Mom o buy bigger mousetraps,” I said numbly.

  “Henry,” it said in its deep, rumbling voice, mouth stretg into a smile, “it’s me! Ethan!”

  I squi it, tilting my head left, then right. “You? Ethan? Sorry, but I remember my best friend being about three feet shorter.”

  “But—”

  “And I happen to know that he ’t grow so much as a mustache, much less a whole everything of hair!”

  It frowned. “That was uncalled for, Henry.”

  I crossed my arms. “I don’t know how you got in here, but you obviously don’t know whose house this is! I am Henry Rider, the Maiam Hunter! I’m going bay room to grab Sptsy, and if you’re still here when I get back—”

  “Henry!” It grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me, nearly giving me whipsh in the process. “It’s really me! I took one of those NuYu pills!”

  “Get your hands off of…”

  Wait. NuYu pills? How would a stupid, smelly bigfoot know about those? Unless…And that would mean…

  “E- Ethan?” I asked in disbelief.

  He grinned his big sasquatch grin—so I punched him in the face. His hairy, sweaty, hard-as-a-rock face.

  Ow.

  “What were you thinking?” I demanded. “I thought you said you’d ged your mind!”

  “I only said that so we could leave,” he expined without a trace of guilt. “I bought them when you went off to talk to Jade. Oh! Speaking of which…”

  His sausage-like fingers burrowed into the fur around his neck, ahdrew the neckce. It began to glow, and Jade fwoosh-ed herself ience. If she was surprised to see a massive ape thing in my upstairs hallway, she didn’t show it.

  “What do you think?” he asked again, looking from me to Jade.

  “I think you’re—”

  “What we think doesn’t matter,” Jade cut me off. “What matters is what you think. Do you like this body?”

  I gred at Jade, but she didn’t even look at me.

  “Hmm,” said Ethan. He raised both his hands and curled them into fists that were bigger than my head. “I’m big like this. Strong.”

  “What’s strong,” I interrupted, “is your body odor. You smell like you took a bath inside a dead cow!”

  Ethan paused, then smiled and licked his lips. “Mmm…cow.”

  “Did you know about this?” I asked, turning on Jade.

  She shook her head. “I knew he was going to try it someday, but I didn’t know he already had.”

  I grabbed two fistfuls of my hair. “This is bad. Ooh, chocote covered brussel sprouts, this is so, so bad!”

  “Heidi gave me five pills,” Ethan chimed in. “All of them turo something different. She called it a, um…oh, a trial period!”

  “I’m gonna kill her!” I took a deep breath a out slowly. “Okay. All right. This is fine. I fix this. The pill you took will wear off iy four hours, right? Right. So I just have to keep your hairy butt ihe house all day!”

  “But what about school?” Jade asked.

  Ethan’s eyes lit up. “School? School has lunches! Good lunches!”

  I shook my head. “Nope, no school today. Do you have any idea how big a panic you would cause if you showed up looking like that?”

  “A,” he whined. “But I’m hungry!”

  “Look, just go back to your room,” I said. “I’ll bring you some food ter.”

  Ethan’s stomach growled, and he looked away, ashamed. “I already ate my pillow.”

  “What? Why would you—”

  “And my covers.”

  I spped my forehead. "Fine. Whatever. Just go to your room, lock your door, and—"

  "Henry! Ethan!" my mom called from downstairs. "Hurry up a ready for school!"

  I froze, realization crashing down on me like a bowling ball into a pot of mashed potatoes. How was I going to vin to let us stay home without telling her why we couldn't go to school?

  "Hey, Mom, listen," I could hear myself saying, " Ethan took a pill that turned him into Bigfoot and now we have to skip school, okay?"

  "That's fine, honey," she would reply, "but yrounded for the rest of your life and your father and I are writing you out of our will. Want some pancakes?"

  "e with me," I hissed, grabbihan's massive hand and pulling him down the hall. Luckily, he didn't resist, because I don't think I could have forced him to go anywhere he didn't want to. Once we were inside, I smmed the door, locked it, and gave Ethan one mre before throwing my closet door open.

  "What the turkey gizzards did I do in a previous life to deserve this?" I muttered under my breath as I dug through the boxes hidden behind my clothes. "Did I drown puppies? Work for the POA? Put pineapple on pizza?"

  “Henry?” Ethan asked from behind me. “ I eat your pillow?”

  “No!” I snapped. “If you even look at any of my stuff the wrong way, I will…aha!”

  I spun around and thrust a small red rubber ball in front of Ethan’s face. Ethan crossed his eyes to look at it, and then stuck his to—

  “Don’t even think about it!” I ya away from him. “This is my old N.O.S.E. It’s an older model than the one I have now, but it should still do the trick.”

  “But what about—”

  “Shut up!”

  Taking the N.O.S.E. in both hands, I began to squeeze it. HONK HONKA-HONK HONKA-HONKA HONK HONKA, it went, filling my room with its obnoxious squeaking. Let’s see…nerdy brown hair. HONK HONK. Geeky pale skin. HONK HONKA-HONK. About four ialler than me. HONKA HONKA HONKA. The N.O.S.E. would cast an illusion around anyone who put it on, but right now it was set to me. If I put it ohan like this, sasquatch or not, he’d just turn into another Henry Rider, and the world was absolutely not prepared for that. I o reprogram it, which meant having an impromptu bicycle horal in my bedroom.

  Finally, I raised my hand, jumped into the air, and sm du ohan’s stupid face. His nose was so big I almost thought it wouldn’t fit, but it mao su itself onto the tip of his soz and stay put. Before my feet had even touched the grouha foot tall frame shimmered like a mirage and vanished, leaving the dweeby human teen I kanding in its pce.

  I sighed in relief. “Okay, crisis averted.”

  “So, we get to go to school?” Ethan asked.

  “Sure.” I nodded weakly. “Screw it. Yeah, let’s go to school.”

  I found Jade standing outside my room when I opehe door. She could have easily walked straight through it, but I guess she didn’t want to invade my privacy.

  Or more likely, she wao get away from Ethan’s smell for a few minutes.

  She perked up as soon as she saw us. “Is he—”

  I put a fio her lips, sileng her. “Not. A freaking. Word.”

  “Mmm,” Ethan rumbled, breathing in through his nose. “Breakfast! Smells good!”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “Remember: no matter how you lht now, you’re still a sasquatch! The N.O.S.E. made your real body invisible, but it’s still there. So be—”

  “Henry? Why are you talking to my stomach?”

  I paused, then realized I’d already fotten what I had just told Ethan not tet. I’d been looking him in the eye when I’d been talking—or at least I thought I had. But while the eyes on his holographic human body were roughly at the same height as mine, his real eyes were about three feet above me.

  “Just…” I took another deep breath. “Just pretend you’re not a foot tall freak, okay?”

  He grinned. “Okay!”

  Ohhh, whoopie cushion in the sky, this was going to end horribly. Still, I’d done everything I could do. All I could do now was think happy thoughts and pray, pray, pray!

  I led the way downstairs, hoping that nobody would notice the gargantuan THUD! that apanied each of Ethan’s footsteps, and made my way to the kit.

  “M, Henry!” Mom said, standing in front of the stove. The sound of sizzling eggs and ba filled the air, making my mouth water. Ethan was right about ohing, I realized: breakfast did smell amazing this—

  CRASH!

  I spun round, and all feeli my body when I saw Ethan standing with a head-shaped hole in the doorframe above him.

  I’ll introduce Heidi to Sptsy for this, I thought with my teeth gritted. And if Sptsy gives her amnesia, I’ll introduce her again, and again, and again…

  Mom looked at the newly made hole with wide eyes, her mouth hanging open.

  “We must have termites,” she finally muttered.

  I fell into my chair, hardly able to believe my luck. But theire table shook as Ethan sat down across from me, an eager smile on his face, and my stomach did a somersault. I was going to have to deal with this all freaking day, wasn’t I? The thought of all the trouble he was going to cause at sade me feel sick.

  “Hey, Henry?” Ethan whispered as quietly as a sasquatch could. “I know you told me not to, but, uh…I ate your pillow.”

  My face smmed down onto the kit table.

  Please, just kill me now.