Escape from the Drooling Octopod! by Robert West Page A

way — and a mini carousel.
    Luckily, she also had a few things guys liked to mess around with. Ghoulie had a lot more fun than he had expected — playing with cars, big and small, that scooted around, vrooming and honking on the floor, and planes that would fly around the room sounding like tiny lawn mowers. The trouble, of course, was that even these were mostly colored pink. Beamer swallowed hard each time he touched one of them.
    As far as he could tell, Alana seemed to be having a good time. If anything, she seemed a little hyperexcited to have people to play with. There were a few times when she had trouble sharing. Beamer was about to chalk this trait up to her “evil” side, when it occurred to him that she probably hadn’t had much practice. How do you learn to share when you have no one to share with?
    Yeah, this girl might as well have been born on the moon. Planet Earth was a total mystery to her. She had no TV and no video-game machine. She did have a computer, which Ghoulie hooked on to right away. But it had no connection to the Internet. The only programs on the machine were educational ones.
    That’s not to say Alana wasn’t smart. When it came to facts, she was a walking, talking encyclopedia. All they had to do was say a word — like maybe albatross — and she’d rattle off what it meant in incredible detail.
    She was no slouch when it came to numbers either. Ghoulie was on her computer, trying to show her where he lived, when she popped down beside him and used her map and geography programs to calculate the distance to his house, how far the house was from the exact center of the city, and the pollution content of the air around his house. All Ghoulie could do was gulp.
    To Beamer, it seemed she was more like a robot in the process of being programmed than a kid learning. It was weird. There were huge gaps in her “programming.”
    The more he thought about it, the more worried Beamer became. You couldn’t tell by looking — what with her having a big house full of goodies — but, no doubt about it, Alana lived in a bubble. Whatever else she might be, she was every bit as delicate as one of her glass figurines. Any mo-ment, he worried, they could accidentally do or say something that would break her and her bubble into a thousand pieces.

10
    Oh, Brother
    It wasn’t surprising that Alana wanted to know everything about everything outside her bubble. Some of her questions were kind of strange.
    â€œHow can you walk to school?” she asked Scilla. “Won’t the gangs kill you before you get there?”
    What she did know about the world was definitely a little warped.
    â€œWell, I’ve heard about gangs,” Scilla said, “but I’ve never seen any around here — except for the Scull Cross gang. They’re mean, but they don’t kill anyone.”
    â€œBut aren’t there wars and plagues and criminals and hypocrites everywhere?” Alana asked.
    â€œI haven’t seen any of that stuff either,” said Scilla with a shrug, “except on TV. Well, I might have seen a hypocrite, I suppose, since I don’t know what that is.”
    Beamer looked questioningly at Ghoulie, who merely shrugged and said, “Me neither. I guess that’s something you learn after the seventh grade.”
    â€œI think . . . well, I mean you’re thinking about it all wrong,” Beamer said. “Bad things do happen, but an awful lot of good things happen too — much more than the bad, maybe. And if you spend your time worrying about the bad things, you never see the good things.” He’d said something like that to his mom when they were watching the fireflies one night last summer. She thought it sounded pretty good.
    Alana tilted her head sideways to think about it. Good and bad — did Alana even know what the words meant? Beamer wondered.
    Beamer tried to see Alana as she really was. In